


Sunshine

by SociopathicAngel



Series: Project Sunshine [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Case Fic, Drugs, Eventual Relationships, Eventual Smut, Fluff and Smut, M/M, Mentions of PTSD, POV Sherlock Holmes, Post S3, Sherlock Holmes Has a Heart, Sherlock and John go to the States, Snakes, but not Sherlock with drugs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-14
Updated: 2016-07-10
Packaged: 2018-05-26 14:25:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 17
Words: 50,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6242914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SociopathicAngel/pseuds/SociopathicAngel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Sherlock agreed to help out a single mother with what seemed to be a spree of serial killings, he hadn't really been anticipating just how involved the whole thing was. Sherlock and John head to Missouri for an impromptu "holiday," and leave with a new ally, relationship, enemy, and a whole new outlook on weather.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prelude to Sunshine

Mrs. Watson was woken in the night by the sixth sense that only mothers seemed to have. She quickly extracted herself from the bed, careful not to wake her husband in the process, and hurried down the hall to hover outside her son’s door. Sure enough, she could hear faint sobbing from within. She slipped in and over to the bed where her son lay curled under the covers, crying.

“John,” Mrs. Watson called softly. “Johnny, dear… Why don’t you come out of there?”

“N-No!”

Mrs. Watson sat down on the bed and pulled the crying toddler, blankets and all, onto her lap.

“Did you have another nightmare, dear?”

He nodded, only the top of his golden head visible from the cocoon of covers. John had been having an increase in nightmares ever since he had snuck out of bed to secretly sit in on almost half of the horror movie Mr. and Mrs. Watson had put on a week ago. So far, nothing Mrs. Watson had attempted had proved successful in soothing the three-year-old. But she had one more idea up her sleeve this night.

“John, I’m going to be right back, okay? I’m going to go get something that will make it all better,” Mrs. Watson promised.

She moved quickly out into the hall and down to the closet, retrieving an old sun-shaded night light that had originally been intended for Harriet. However, the older girl had nearly broken it on several occasions during her rebellion of all things “childish.” Mrs. Watson brought the light back into John’s room and promptly plugged it in. She then scooped the still trembling boy back into her lap once more, and sang to him as she gently rocked him in her arms.

 _“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are grey. You’ll never know dear, how much I love you. Please don’t take my sunshine away…_ Open your eyes, Johnny.”

Light blue eyes, still wet and reddened, slowly cracked open… and quickly flew wide with wonder.

“Now any time you’re scared or sad, you just need to open your eyes, look at that sunshine, and I’ll be right here with you,” She promised, kissing each of her son’s damp cheeks

* * *

Even though John had never actually remembered that night in particular, he had remembered its meaning, and he remembered the song in relation to it. John lived for the sunny days. After long hours studying, or the ever frequent fights with his sister, or just when he was feeling down, the sun never failed to cheer him up. And when the sun wasn't there to do it – as it frequently wasn't in England – he would put in his earphones and listen to the song instead, or hum it to himself.

Some people were inclined to find it painfully ironic – John included – that his love for the sun died while he was deployed in Afghanistan. After a time, John no longer found comfort in it. In fact, he rarely ever acknowledged its presence anymore. Only after a long night of tension or stress did the first rays of the morning bring comfort and joy back to him.

However, it was not until the last leg of his final tour, quite unbeknownst to him, that John would come to actively despise the sun. This change of heart came with the coming and going of Private Jason Wilson, a boy no older than twenty who had taken three rounds to the abdomen while out on patrol. All but one of the hits had been superficial, and the one that wasn't still was only a mild concern for the doctors on hand. Wilson never gave them any cause for worry either, being far too responsive and good natured for it to be assumed that he was actually standing on the Devil’s doorstep with his finger holding down the buzzer.

Due to a recent attack, they were quite understaffed at the moment. So whenever John wasn’t out on patrol as a field medic, he and the rest of the medical staff were in their little hut doing what they could for their patients.

“Good morning, Private,” John said cheerfully as he approached the bedside.

“Mornin’, Doc! Here to do up them dressings again?” Wilson asked.

“How could you possibly know? Three days here and you’ve already got my whole routine memorized, have you?” John teased.

Wilson had just grinned. At the time, the sweat on his face had been dismissed by all as an effect of the Afghan sun and his overall weakness. It was normal to be constantly covered with a sheen of sweat out here. John did, however, make a small mental note of the redness about the wound. As the doctor worked, Wilson lolled his head to look out the tent window and sighed.

“What I wouldn't give just to see one cloud out here. Just one!” He moaned.

“Not a fan of the sun?” John asked somewhat absently.

“No, sir. I like them clouds. Back home, my mum is a gardener for this big poncy place. Has been my ‘ole life. When it rained, she didn't have to go in, so me an’ her would have a day in together. Those were always my favourite days,” He said, smiling wistfully.

Not a minute later, John had finished his dressings and was rushing off to a new arrival. He spent the next several hours trying to piece back together the unfortunate victim of an IED, his mental note forgotten. He neglected to tell the next doctor that would be covering Wilson to check the man’s wounds. By two in the afternoon, infection had set into Wilson’s blood stream and fully took hold of the man. In his already weakened state, the private fell to his fever before nightfall.

When the news finally reached John that evening, he immediately looked up at the endless miles of blue above. There wasn’t a cloud in sight. Private Jason Wilson died under a blue sky and an unforgiving sun.

The following day, as Captain John Watson lay in the sand, his life blood pulsing heavily from his shoulder and his vision slowly beginning to dim, he stared up at a single, forlorn cloud in the sky.

 


	2. Chapter 1

The steady tip-tapping that accompanied John's typing had fallen silent, and though Sherlock couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment it had stopped, he could estimate it had been several minutes ago. Looking up from his microscope, he was greeted by his frowning flatmate. John held out his laptop without a word, then pointed to a private message on his blog when Sherlock failed to immediately look at it.

"Fancy a holiday?" John asked, an eyebrow raised pointedly.

The message read as follows:

> _Doctor Watson,_
> 
> _My name is Nicole Chambers. My son is 17 and soon to graduate. When he was born, his father, Bryan, and I set up a fund to help pay for his college when he was ready. A portion of each of our paychecks went into this fund. Bryan and I got a divorce two years ago, and up until seven months ago we both continued to make deposits. Last month the bank alerted me that over half of the fund (approximately $10,000) had been removed. Bryan denied having taken it and because it is a joint account, the bank will not take action. Without his fund we simply have no idea what to do.  My son has been a huge supporter and fan of you and Mr. Holmes for years, and is set on becoming a forensic analyst because of it. I remembered him talking about you two, so I thought I would try to see if I could contact you. If you have any advice or can help us in any way, I would be immensely grateful._
> 
> _-Nicole Chambers [St. Louis, Missouri USA]_

"Holiday?" Sherlock echoed, finally looking at the message. "To... America. Why exactly?"

"Did you actually _read_ it?"

"Yes, and that is barely a four. Why would we go all the way to the States just to tell her what I can clear up with a simple email? If I bother to anyway. It's so obvious it's almost annoying. Surely she can parse it together on her own," Sherlock scoffed dismissively.

John pulled up another message and thrust the computer under his nose before Sherlock could fully turn away.

> _Doctor Watson,_
> 
> _You asked me to inform you should any more information arise, and unfortunately some has. My ex-husband was found dead in his house two nights ago. He had suffered a massive drug overdose, though the police won't tell me of what and I know the Bryan I had been married to for 16 years would never touch drugs. The bank finally agreed to give me access to his recent activity. Bryan had withdrawn almost all of his checking and savings account four months ago and hadn't touched anything else since. He also hadn't touched Jaydon's fund. The police are currently investigating, as three other people in the county have also died of similar causes. None of the four had ever been known to be users and the police are stumped on how they even got the stuff._
> 
> _-Nicole Chambers [St. Louis, Missouri USA]_

Now that, Sherlock decided, was definitely higher than a four.

"Have you checked the airline times yet?" Sherlock asked.

John paused. "Ah, no."

"Have you even packed?" Sherlock pressed.

John's eye twitched. "Here, you get us a flight while I go do that and call work... And I'm not packing for you either," He added pointedly, dropping his computer in Sherlock's lap before fleeing the kitchen.

With a small sigh, Sherlock got to work making all of the arrangements for their "work holiday." He was moderately surprised when he did not receive a call from his brother before they'd gotten on the plane the following morning, even more so when there was nothing waiting for him once he'd turned his mobile back on after landing.

It took a few minutes consideration to get used to driving on the wrong side, the completely wrong side of everything really, but Sherlock prided himself in getting them to the hotel in once piece... Not that John was ever to know he had had any doubt in his ability to do so. At the room, John forced Sherlock to sit and wait while he arranged a meeting with Ms. Chambers. Unfortunately, Sherlock had not taken into account the major time change.

To say that the eleven hours _on_ the plane wasn't torture enough. John didn't seem to have much problem with it, save for an hour or so where a small child decided that its universe was just too abysmal to continue and wanted to ensure the whole world knew that too. Sherlock had a bit of a soft spot for young children (they were extremely honest and forthright with information) but this one in particular... The remaining four hours of the flight had been rather entertaining, as Sherlock made a list of all the possible ways one could murder someone within the plane and gleefully relayed this information to John... and the now rather traumatized woman who had been sitting beside him. That, John had later informed him, was considered "a bit not okay."

"Since this _is_ also a holiday, at least according to my work it is, we are going to be doing some actual _holiday_ things while we're here, Sherlock," John called from restroom where he was setting down his carry-bag.

"Holiday things. What could you _possibly_ do on holiday _here?"_ Sherlock scoffed.

"Try foods for one. They have pork chops here, some neat little restaurants here and there. Could probably get tickets for a hockey game while we're in, apparently the season's on and their team is doing well," John replied, scrolling through a list he'd pulled up on his mobile.

Sherlock stared at the man. Slowly, John broke into a grin and laughed.

"Teasing, Sherl. This case is important. If we decide to stick around a bit afterwards..." John trailed off, raising an eyebrow in question.

He frowned and flopped dramatically onto the bed instead of answering. The room they'd booked was distinctly impersonal, with tired wallpaper that was an unnameable tan-yellow colour and a darker, near threadbare carpeting to match. The bed was... a most bizarre combination of being both too soft and entirely too firm at the same time, and the sheets smelled distinctly... odd. All in all, the room was depressingly unimpressive. The only redeeming factors were the presence of free wifi, and a rather nice jacuzzi-bath that John appeared thoroughly decided with. Perhaps its presence would make up for the fact that Sherlock hadn't specified the need for two beds, instead demanding the first available room for two that had a balcony.

_That_ , at least, had showed some forethought to John. He hated it when Sherlock smoked in the room. That did not, however, stop John from griping about it entirely.

Upon entering the room, the man had stopped, pinched the bridge of his nose, and taken several slow breaths.

"Sherlock?"

Having moved immediately to open the door to the balcony, Sherlock hummed in acknowledgement.

"There's only one bed."

"Yes," He’d said slowly, waiting for the point.

" _Why."_

"..."

" _Sherlock."_

"Have you seen the bathroom?"

* * *

Two hours later, at eleven o'clock on the dot, Sherlock was striding into St. Louis Bread Co. (aka Panera, apparently) with John in tow. They secured a table and settled in to wait, John ordering from the front counter beforehand. Ms. Chambers joined them just as he received his food, her own coffee and scone in hand. John casually slid a muffin on a napkin in front of Sherlock, giving him a harsh, no-argument glare when Sherlock immediately ignored it.

Nicole Chambers was a slender woman in her early forties with dark, curly hair that was only just beginning to grey around the temples. She was still in her nursing scrubs, though she'd removed her badge, and carried the aura of a long-term nurse who knew her stuff and expected to be listened to. Despite her stern carriage, she had a very warm smile and motherly personality. Sherlock couldn't readily decide whether she was tolerable or not.

"Thank you so much for agreeing to meet with me," She greeted them.

Sherlock wasn't quite in the mood for chit-chat. "Ms. Chambers, can you tell us more about Bryan?"

“Of course. What would you like to know?”

“What was his occupation?”

“He was a bank accountant, but not for the bank that we had our fund in.”

“Can you give us the address of his work, your bank, and his former residence? Oh, and of the police department that’s working his case.”

Ms. Chambers nodded, reaching into her purse for a pen and pulling a napkin closer to her. John tucked it into his pocket when she’d finished, then launched into a series of more personal inquiries about her and her son. Sherlock would never think to ask most of these questions - mostly because he really could not be arsed to care about it - but they seemed to relax Ms. Chambers, make her more trusting and open to them. Sherlock, after cross-referencing this with several other past cases, firmly decided that John was actually a genius.

“How close was your son to Bryan?” John was asking.

“Bryan used to take him out almost every weekend, to a movie or restaurant, things like that. We traded off on who got him for holidays, but usually we both got to see him in the same day. Bryan didn't live too far from us and we had separated on good terms. It wasn't until about seven months ago, around the same time Bryan stopped making deposits, that he stopped contacting us. Jaydon was heartbroken, and about a month before his fund was stolen he all but disowned Bryan,” Ms. Chambers stated sadly.

“Would it be alright if we spoke to Jaydon? Not today, of course,” John added quickly. “Sherlock and I could use a bit to come around to the time change.”

“Oh, I’ll ask him. He should be home tomorrow around four, he has band practice after school.”

John scribbled down his number on a napkin and passed it to her, asking her to call if she remembered anything important or to arrange their meeting with Jaydon. Meeting completed, they headed back to their hotel. John made a beeline for the jacuzzi-tub with vague threats upon Sherlock’s person should he be disturbed. Sherlock noted that he didn’t lock the door behind him. It took a moment to carefully extract the pack of cigarettes he had hidden in their travel bag, and Sherlock was careful not to make too much noise while slipping out onto the balcony.

Half a cigarette later, Sherlock had fully organized the case in his head and was now twitching in his skin. He should have showered as soon as they got to the hotel. Air travel always left him feeling distinctly unclean.

Sherlock stubbed out his cigarette, gathered a change of clothes, and strode into the bathroom. The protesting squawk from the tub reminded Sherlock that it was, in fact, occupied. Sherlock elected to ignore him, pushing aside the curtain to crank on the hot water in the separate shower-stall. John let out an exasperated sigh.

“Sherlock… do you ever actually hear anything I say to you?”

“When it’s important. Why, did you say something?”

“Did I-” John cut himself off, pressing his thumb and forefinger into his temples.

“Problem?” Sherlock demanded, finally turning to the man.

John stared at him, dumbfounded. " _Yes_ there's a problem! I am trying to have a bath and you've just stormed in!"

"Yes, I was going to have a shower-"

"I'm still in here!"

At this point, Sherlock was helplessly lost. "How is that a problem? It's not like we haven't seen each other undressed before, John. We _have_ lived together for several years now-"

"Yes, and flatmates don't bathe together-"

"We aren't 'bathing' together! You're in the tub and I was getting in the shower! Oh for God's sake, if it is _that_ big of deal I'll wait!" Sherlock snapped, turning back to the shower.

"Oh, no! Don't let _me_ interrupt _your_ shower time, lord forbid!" John snorted.

"If you so insist," Sherlock quipped.

Without so much as a glance at the other man, Sherlock promptly stripped out of his clothing, folded it neatly, and stepped behind the curtain into his shower. John let out an indignant, frustrated cry, which morphed into an even more frustrated groan about halfway through and was further drowned out as he apparently submerged himself. Sherlock counted this as a small personal victory to himself.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, hello. Here's chapter 1, sorry if it's a tad bit dry. Just kind of a starter. Sherlock should never be trusted to book hotel rooms, or to entertain himself on a plane. Anyhoo, I feel I should mention that Jaydon is based off my lovely wife and queen, who is the most fabulous man I've ever met and my #1 sunshine fan since the start of all this. So shout out to him. Next chapter will be up on Easter Sunday, though I can't give a time frame because I have no idea what/if anything my family plans for that day.  
> As always, questions or concerns: please comment or find my on tumblr. My user is zinaide. Special thanks to my betas, Alaska and Loki.


	3. Chapter 2

The matter of the single bed was to be resolved another night, as Sherlock found his time was better spent doing research than sleeping. John had given him the silent treatment after the bathroom incident up until the point Sherlock finally had enough and set aside his research to volunteer to call room service. John was moderately more friendly after that. At least, he was no longer pointedly ignoring Sherlock and was now simply leaving him to his own devices. That suited Sherlock just fine. Having the oppressive cloud that came with an irritated John Watson hanging constantly overhead put a rather noticeable damper on Sherlock's productivity.

When John called out a tired goodnight - it was only nine by local time - Sherlock took his computer to the chair by the balcony doors and settled in. By sunrise, Sherlock knew everything the internet and the police database could offer on American banking systems and the kind of drug deals common to St. Louis.

John came around with the sun, rolling out off bed and shuffling sleepily over to turn on the coffee maker. Sherlock had always liked this rare version of John. With most people he found it painful to watch them come online, but with John it was strangely endearing. He was still sleep rumpled and tended to be more affectionate. While physical boundaries between them had naturally eroded over the years, John still had a small "personal space and limit" when he was fully awake and sober. When half-awake or inebriated, even that bubble fell away.

John came over to stand beside him, squinting at the early morning light, and placed a casual hand on Sherlock's head.

"Did you sleep at all?" He asked.

Sherlock nudged his head into John's hand. "Of course not, there's work to be done."

"Let it be known, not even something as drastic as time zones can slow down the great Sherlock Holmes," John teased, giving a small curl of his fingers. "You're having some coffee _and_ something to eat before we go talk to Jaydon."

And thus marked the return of Doctor Watson, caregiver extraordinaire. Sherlock gave a soft sigh, leaning his head into the hand briefly one last time before pulling away and unfolding himself from his chair. John went back to fiddling with the coffee machine while Sherlock grabbed a change of clothes and slipped into the bathroom, not wanting to evoke another hissy fit.

John finally abandoned the machine, swearing rather colourfully for so early in the morning, and declared that they would just have to get caffeine downstairs.

   

Shortly after breakfast, which Sherlock begrudgingly picked his way through, Ms. Chambers called to arrange their meeting with Jaydon, as well as the head detective on her ex-husband's case. Jaydon, who had had more contact with his father than Ms. Chambers of recent, admitted that Bryan's behaviour had changed the last few times they'd been together. Bryan had been withdrawn and restless, more so than Jaydon would normally check off as his father's rampant ADHD. However, Jaydon remained adamant that his father would never have anything to do with drugs.

Their discussion with Detective Lindner went quite the opposite. Lindner confirmed that a month before Bryan's death, they had been granted a warrant to search Bryan's house after he tested positive at work on a routine drug-test. They were unable to find any illegal substance, and Bryan's follow-up test had been clean, so it had been dismissed as a false positive. The three others, while never officially confirmed, had been suspected by their employers, family, or acquaintances of having a drug habit. All four had little to nothing in common save for living in the same relative area, but the police believed they all received their fatal doses from the same source.

The question remained, however, as to _how_ they had gotten a hold of the drugs and _how_ had they died. The toxicology report didn't match up with the "overdose" claim the police had told the public. So far they hadn't been able to identify the mystery substance as it had already broken down substantially before the bodies were recovered, though they did confirm that it was the same in all four victims and definitely the cause of death. It was enough to link the four.

Sherlock suppressed the little thrill that ran through him. This case was _much_ higher than a four. Actually, he couldn't quite place a number on it yet. New information kept cropping up that didn't quite fit with any previous theories.

"You're enjoying yourself, aren't you?" John asked on the drive back to the hotel. "That's all fine, I know actual _interest_ will get you to solve this faster, but try not to act too excited around Ms. Chambers and her son, yeah?"

"There was really no love lost between Chambers and her husband-"

"No, but there _is_ with the son. Just... try to be at least marginally sympathetic with the kid?"

Sherlock sighed and gave a slight nod.

* * *

"The other scenes have already been cleaned up," Lindner explained, unlocking the door to Bryan's house. "We have photographs back at the precinct if you want a look."

"Yes, thank you," Sherlock said absently as he slipped past the man into the house.

John followed a bit more slowly, talking to Lindner about the place. The detective had been the first man on the scene after receiving an anonymous call that Bryan had not been seen out of his house in over a week and no one had heard from him. This is how all of the bodies had been discovered.

"He'd been dead about nine days when we found him. You can imagine the smell. He had an auto-feeder for his cat, so it was fine. It's down at the shelter right now. Don't know what we're going to do with it," Lindner was saying.

"Give it to the son," Sherlock interrupted. "He's fond of it. Now, if you can't tell me anything _useful_ , do get out. Actually, you can't tell me anything of use that I don't already know, so please do leave."

John let out a soft sigh, but didn't object. Lindner froze, astonished, and for a moment looked as though he was about to object. With the air of a man who was leaving quite entirely of his own violation, he turned on his heel and left the house. Sherlock could practically feel the disapproval radiating from John and elected to ignore it.

"He's not Lestrade, you know," John warned. "He doesn't _have_ to put up with you at all. They didn't call you for help, Ms. Chambers did. As far as they're concerned you're on your own. David was helping on his own terms."

"David?"

"Detective Lindner, Sherlock-"

"Just met him today and you're already on a first name basis? Not usually your area, John," Sherlock noted, observing the room more than his partner. "Did you catch our client's first name too?"

"Yes, I did. It's Nicole- Not my area?" John broke off, seeming to choke. "What in the blazes is that supposed to mean 'not usually my area?'"

Sherlock hummed noncommittally, dropping to his knees to pull out his magnifying glass and study a peculiar mark in the hardwood.

"I wasn't _flirting_ with him!"

"Never said you were. John, take a look at this-"

"It is perfectly _normal_ to know people's first names, Sherlock. Even people you've just met- You know what. Sod this. What did you find?" John demanded.

Sherlock had to take a moment, the abrupt change from flustered-John to working-John throwing him. Jarring himself back into action, his two-second reboot just long enough to draw John's attention, Sherlock waved the man over for him to have a look. John peered at the gouge through the glass and frowned.

"What exactly am I looking at here?" He asked. "Is that... That's a fingernail in there, isn't it?"

"It would appear so. And what does that tell us?" Sherlock tested.

"Bryan resisted... You don't think he was alone."

"No, I don't. He was dragged through here, this wasn't where his body was found and that mark is recent enough to be from his disappearance, Someone _made_ him take the drug... I need to look at the rest of the house. Call that detective back in."

Sherlock was up and pacing the room before John had even looked up from the floor. By the time John returned, Sherlock already knew all he needed to and really had no actual need for the man.

"You searched this house, yes? Top to bottom? Find anything?" Sherlock demanded.

"Of course we searched it. Found a very small bit of marijuana in his liquor cabinet but nothing really damning," Lindner admitted, a note of frustration underlying his tone.

Sherlock took a mental note of that. "John, if you wouldn't mind collecting that nail, we'll be paying a visit to the late Mr. Glass. I would like to pay a visit to his lab before we go though."

"Lab?" Lindner echoed. "We never found-"

"Of course _you_ didn't. It's this way to the basement, isn't it?"

Sherlock strode off without waiting for an answer, easily finding the door that led to the basement stairs. Lindner was close on his heels, much to Sherlock's irritation.

The basement was finished, fully carpeted and decorated. It appeared to be the most used place in the house for hosting guests, complete with a bar and several gaming tables. The carpet was a tight woven off-white colour the blended unobtrusively with the tannish walls, all of which were adorned with many sports-team photos, beer signs, movie posters and the like. The most striking thing of the whole place was that it felt distinctly smaller than it should have been.

Of course, that was because it _was_ distinctly smaller than it should have been. The missing area of roughly two by three meters should have been in the area behind the staircase, yet instead there was only solid walls.

It was to this wall that Sherlock immediately walked to and, after a moment's study, twisted a small blue music note that appeared to represent a local sports team. The surprisingly well-hidden door opened with a soft click. Beyond the door, in striking contrast to the finished basement, was a plain, concrete room. There was a crude, plywood table along the back wall covered in a home cooking-lab. Sherlock moved towards it with care, peering at all of the various instruments upon it.

In the doorway, Lindner had gone tense. "Is that a meth lab?" He asked warily.

"Disused and perfectly harmless now," Sherlock said. "Hasn't been touched in... over a month, I'd say."

"I need to call in a team-"

"Oh go right ahead, I've seen all I need. You know how to reach me when needed."

Sherlock turned to sweep out of the room in his usual fashion only to run directly into a frowning John. He paused, looking down at the man. John was tense, but not noticeably so unless one truly observed him, and Sherlock could tell that this was the kind of tense he became when he was distressed personally by something. He put a hand lightly on John's lower back, steering him around and back towards the staircase.

"Wait, where are we going?" John asked, startled.

"To the morgue. Really, John, do keep up. Did you retrieve the nail?" Sherlock pressed impatiently.

"What? Yes, it's right here-"

"Good. Hold onto it, they'll need it in evidence once I've confirmed it belongs to Mr. Glass."

John stumbled along beside him, apparently still reeling from something or another that Sherlock was likely going to have to deal with once he'd regained his footing. Which happened to occur right as they reached the car. John planted his feet and caught Sherlock by the elbow, firmly halting their progress.

"Wait. Just _wait_ a minute. I don't think Bryan is about to walk away on us, so just hold on," John ordered.

Sherlock sighed, rounding to face him. "What?"

"Back there, how did you know?"

"How did I know what? You'll need to be a bit more precise-"

"How did you know about the lab? And that it hadn't been used in a month?" John demanded.

"Over a month-"

"Sherlock."

"Well there had to be drugs _somewhere_ in the house, and as there wasn’t an upper level it had to have been the basement. I didn't know if he was making it himself or just storing it, but there had to be some. The police hadn't found anything, so it had to be well hidden. I suspected a lab, and a meth lab is more likely in Missouri. Finding it was simple, you could have done it if you'd been paying attention-"

"Yes, alright. But over a month?" John interrupted.

Sherlock paused again, studying him. Oh.

"The dust," He explained, slowly. "There is just over a month's build-up of dust all over that table. If it was still in use, the equipment at the very least would still be clean. I don't have any actual experience with labs themselves, if that's what is worrying you."

John let out a barely audible sigh and nodded, releasing Sherlock's arm to continue on to the car. Sherlock followed a bit more slowly. It was no secret that any mention of Sherlock's past substance use greatly upset the doctor. Why, Sherlock hadn't the faintest idea. He hadn't noticed John react in that way when dealing with other addicts 一 the homeless network or clients and whatnot.

Sherlock filed the event away for later dissection and climbed into their rental Jeep. John was already buckled into his seat and staring forward at seemingly nothing, and he turned to smile slightly at Sherlock when he finally joined him. He didn't return the smile, but he felt his expression soften a bit in response. The drive to the morgue was made in comfortable silence, save for the twittering of the radio which John had set to some classical station after deciding the rest were too "new-age American" for him. The music wasn't terrible, per se, but it reminded Sherlock of the waiting lobby outside the office of the therapist his mother had dragged him to back when he was a child. Not something he was too happy to be reminded of, but he accepted it over the rattle of the car.

The mortician, a stout man named Seven (and really what _were_ his parents thinking), denied them access for nearly twenty minutes before finally calling Lindner at John's snappish request. Sherlock never thought there would be a time where he wished for Molly's presence. Finally, twenty-five minutes and a very annoyed Sherlock Holmes later, the body of Bryan Glass was rolled out.

"John, hold his left hand up, will you?" Sherlock half-asked, half-commanded as he pulled out his magnifying glass and the nail splinter.

A quick scan confirmed that the nail on the middle finger had been broken off practically at the quick. Using forceps, Sherlock carefully lined up the fractured edges.

"And that confirms it," John announced, leaning over Sherlock's shoulder to look, "Mr. Glass wasn't alone the night he died."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Easter everyone!


	4. Chapter 3

John had gone to hunt down some coffees, leaving Sherlock alone with the still crotchety Seven while he continued to fully examine Mr. Glass's body. Other than the broken nail and some faint bruising around the ankles, the body yielded practically nothing. The man clearly hadn't been an actual addict... well, not a proper one anyway. Sherlock didn't quite believe a caffeine addiction counted.

"Report's in," Seven called from his computer.

"And?" Sherlock sighed, stamping down his irritation.

"It's all very degraded, but there is what _was_ a very pure concentration of cocaine in his blood. Something else there too, can't ID it just yet. I'll have to expand the search," Seven added, running a hand through his salt and pepper hair. "I'd bet my lunch that whatever it is is the cause of death, at least in works with the cocaine that is. There wasn't enough cocaine in him, degraded or not, for it to have been a simple overdose."

Sherlock quietly revised his previous opinion of the oddly named man to "moderately adept and possibly useful."

"Toxin or another drug?" He asked, actually curious to the man's thoughts.

"Can't say for sure, but I'd call toxin. I'll start running a broader test," Seven decided.

"Pass me those forceps, I'm going to take hair samples," Sherlock decided.

Seven handed them over, along with a clean sheet of paper, and headed back to his computer. Sherlock quickly folded up the page, creating the well-known druggist fold, and set to work carefully plucking hairs from throughout the head. John returned before he'd finished, carrying sickly-sweet smelling coffees. Sherlock nodded a brief thanks as John placed the cup beside him, turning over his shoulder to address Seven.

"Have any screening tests been run on the hair yet?" He called.

"Yes, my assistant ran an immunoassay when the body arrived. I was going to rerun it and follow it up with a confirmation test now that we know the actual drug. I can update you on the results once they come through, if you like," Seven offered, glancing up from his computer.

Sherlock blinked, momentarily taken back. This was definitely not Molly... unless Molly had suddenly gotten a lot better at doing her makeup.

"Yes... Thank you. Number is on my card, do text if you can," Sherlock added as an afterthought. "Hair samples are on the table."

"Have any preference on gas versus liquid chromatography with the mass?"

Sherlock paused, considering, "Gas, both timeline and quantity."

Seven gave a little wave, adjusting his wire frame glasses and going back to studying his screen. John, who hadn't said a word since he entered, looked decidedly lost as he followed after Sherlock, both coffees back in hand. Blessedly - or not, Sherlock hadn't decided yet - John seemed to be in habit of waiting until they were in the car to start asking questions. This time, however, Sherlock could accept that John would be confused. The man wasn't exactly a forensic expert.

"Right, you're confused," Sherlock announced the moment John's door closed.

"A bit. Why are we messing with a dead man's hair?" John asked.

"Hair is extremely important, it can tell you anything. Hair doesn't have a metabolic rate, it doesn't excrete what gets placed into it. Once it's there, it's there. Hair is the body's own chemical record of anything that’s gone into the body in the last few months. All we need to do is analyze the hair shaft, that's done with the tests Seven and I were discussing, and it can tell us exactly when a drug was ingested and of what quantity," Sherlock explained, uncharacteristically patient.

"He said 'mass' back there."

"Mass spectrometry. When paired with the gas chromatography it will get us the results we need. See, gas chromatography only separates the substances, it can't tell you what they are. Connect it up to a mass spectrometer and it breaks it all down into fragments. No two substances have the same fragmentations."

"And immuno-whatsit?”

"Immunoassay. That's just a screening test一 a field test, if you will. Preliminary, just to figure out if there actually is anything to be found to begin with."

John nodded, lapsing into silence now. He asked questions now and then about the actual forensic process of cases, driven by his medical curiosity, and Sherlock did the best he could to answer them to the best of his knowledge. Sherlock couldn't claim to be a forensic expert himself. No, the field was constantly changing and developing, growing more advanced and accurate with each passing year. In his downtime, he would read up on all of the new methods that'd come about or research in more depth whatever particular test he may need to run for his current case so that he could accurately do it on his own. The chemical archive provided by individual hairs was actually something he had first discovered while in rehab, and was one of the very few things he hadn't deleted from that time.

Sherlock was jolted out of his thoughts by the appearance of a fat, white flake landing on the windshield in front of him. The flake sat for only a few seconds before melting away to several parse droplets. Several more flakes fell onto the glass, doing the same, and then they began to fall in earnest. Within minutes, they were caught in the beginnings of a snow storm.

"Ah, was wondering when it'd start," John commented beside him. "The barista said there was some hellish storm blowing in."

Sherlock frowned. "It's March. Isn't that supposed to be the start of spring here?"

"I asked the same thing. I believe her exact words were 'welcome to Missouri, where the weather forecast is made up and the seasons don't matter,'" John quoted, amused.

"That's ridiculous."

"We should stop to get some food before we get back to the hotel. She said the roads will probably be bad tomorrow."

"It was twenty degrees when we landed here," Sherlock protested. “How can the weather _possibly_ change that quickly?”

"Yes, and now it is... negative seven, apparently," John replied after consulting his phone.

"This is ridiculous."

"Apparently, this is what counts as normal. I think there's a grocery up on the left there, we should stop by. Tea would be nice," John mused, more to himself than to Sherlock.

“Forensics here must be a bloody nightmare,” Sherlock growled.

Still on a borderline sulk, Sherlock pulled into the parking lot of a rather oversized Wal-Mart and followed John in. By the time they'd finished, both the weather and Sherlock were in an even harsher mood. The latter’s wrath was primarily caused by the former, with now the added bonus of the _five_ women and the one surprising man that had hit on John and gushed over his "amazing accent." He knew John was a magnet for these sort of attentions, but he was never there to really _see_ it. Although the man had seemed to stun John more than it irritated Sherlock, who had spent the time in the store studying John from a distance rather than beside him. John, for his part, had simply assumed Sherlock had slunk off to explore and would return with seemingly random and unconnected items as he was wont to do; and while Sherlock definitely maintained John's fiction, he admittedly spent any trip he was trapped on watching John and his interactions with strangers. Some part of his head nagged that this was probably "a bit not good," but surely John would prefer him doing this than experimenting with how quickly bruises formed on fruit dropped from different heights or how quickly employees could be summoned to various areas of the store - as was his usual method of entertainment. Retail workers, he'd decided, were manageable only in the fact that they dealt with just as much stupidity on a daily basis as he did.

This trip, however, Sherlock rather wished he'd decided to experiment instead of tailing John. Americans, he noted, were rather bold with their interests. So while John was in high spirits from the attentions, Sherlock was on the border of a full-blown black mooded sulk. The main issue was that Sherlock didn't understand _why_ he was so upset by this. The only thing he kept coming back to was that John was _his_ and he wouldn't allow anyone to take him. This had been a recurring emotion that always reared its ugly head whenever John trotted off to some simpleton woman on what he called a “date.” Sherlock didn’t understand why John insisted on wasting his time with all of them when what he clearly enjoyed was running after criminals and all of the exciting life that Sherlock brought to him.

Sherlock made a mental note to more closely study the differences between jealousy and possessiveness.

As if allying with his mood, the weather had turned even more unreasonable by the time they left. Due to some miracle, Sherlock managed to get them back to the hotel without crashing, and 一 by a miracle in John's eyes - he helped carry the bags after only the first prompting. John continued to feign ignorance of Sherlock's mood, setting about making tea with the abomination of a coffee machine in their room. He set a steaming mug, no doubt made precisely to Sherlock's taste, in front of the grouchy detective and ran an affectionate hand through his curls. Sherlock's irritation evaporated and he leaned into the hand.

"What's gotten into you, you big feline?" John asked, voice warm and teasing. "You've been pouting since the snow started."

"I do not _pout,"_ Sherlock retorted.

"Yes you do. Now what is it?" John pressed.

"You saw the conditions of those roads," He rumbled, frowning. "It's only going to get worse. Apparently Missouri is infamous for black ice. We're going to be trapped in _here_ when everything _interesting_ is out _there._ "

John rubbed his fingertips into Sherlock's scalp in a soothing massage. "We'll figure out something to do. The hotel has free wifi, and we haven't looked at the bank records yet," He pointed out. "Now drink your tea and move away from the window, you're freezing."

Sherlock reached for the mug, watching John's retreating form as he headed back over to retrieve his own tea and moved to sit on the still-made side of the bed against the headboard. Sherlock joined him a moment later, and John dropped his laptop between them before flicking on the television. Sherlock gleefully snatched up the computer, and this time John only sighed when his password was guessed in under a second. It had become a bit of a game between them. John would think up a new, somewhat random password about once a week and Sherlock would guess it. So far, he had only been stumped once, and John never had told him what that one was.

 _"Just give me_ one _hint!" Sherlock had snapped after a week and a half of failed attempts and locked screens._

_"Fine. It's the one thing you'd probably never expect me to say to you. No caps, no spaces," John had replied through the shower curtain. “Now get out.”_

Sherlock still had no clue what it could possibly be, and John had seemed both relieved and disappointed when he finally changed it.

Sherlock pushed the frustrating memory aside, opening the internet to start drawing up all the information he could on American banking systems... and the winter conditions common to Missouri. He knew he was likely to delete all of this once the case was finished, but he wanted to be prepared for however long they may be stuck here.

John decided he'd had enough crap-telly not an hour later and slipped out of bed to head into the bathroom, taking their empty mugs with him. Sherlock preemptively turned down the brightness on the computer and quickly changed into pajamas. He was unlikely to go to sleep, but it was a bit more comfortable this way. John returned and slipped into bed, reaching over to tap on the bedside alarm clock and kill the lamp. He made no comment on the bed situation other than a quiet goodnight, and was asleep in minutes.

Sherlock shuffled down, laptop on his chest with the screen tilted so it was still visible. The room was silent save for the steady, lulling breath of the man beside him, and Sherlock soon found himself fighting to stay awake. He decided to be fully miffed about this tomorrow, lord knows he'd have the time to be, and he set the computer on the ground, snuggling into the crisp sheets to fully commit to this "sleeping on the job" thing.

* * *

Sherlock woke feeling overly warm and more than a little disorientated. He inhaled, taking in the heady scent of soap, tea, and that unnameable something that was distinctly John.

Wait.

Sherlock slowly opened his eyes and immediately froze. Not an inch from the tip of his nose was the back of John's neck.Taking a quick bodily check, Sherlock confirmed that he was in fact pressed full length against John's back, and by the deep calm of his breath the doctor was still asleep. They were both in the center of the bed, so it wasn't just Sherlock who'd shifted in his sleep. He sat up slightly, careful not to jostle John in the process, to peer at the alarm clock. It was due to go off in just over an hour. Sherlock put a few inches distance between them and gently rolled himself to face the opposite wall. John was observant enough to tell Sherlock had been sleeping, so better to be caught in a less compromising position than anything else.

Well, that would have been the case if John hadn't rolled over and followed him. Sherlock froze, unsure what to do now that their positions were reversed, and then decided he was too sleep warm and comfortable to be arsed to care. Returning to sleep would be impossible, so he settled for heading into his mind palace to begin reorganizing the facts of the case.

The sudden voices from the alarm clock startled him, but he quickly recovered to continue feigning sleep, curious to witness John's reaction. John wasn't quick to come to, and once he had he tensed minutely, his breath catching. Sherlock maintained his façade, priding himself at having become rather good at it, and simply listened. John slowly slid his arm out from where it had draped across Sherlock's waist and reached over to tap a button on the alarm. He could feel John staring down at him and he struggled not to open his eyes so he could see his expression. John let out a soft sigh and oh-so-carefully slipped out of the bed. Sherlock stifled a twinge of disappointment and elected to stay in bed until he heard the shower start up.

Sherlock shuffled over to the window, keeping the duvet wrapped around him, and groaned aloud. It was _still_ snowing, though not as heavily as before, and it was already covering everything. There was a snow-truck working to clear the road outside, and it seemed to be having some trouble staying _on_ the road.

Despite being spectacularly well rested, more so than he could remember being in years, Sherlock felt unsettled. Something was missing here and he hadn't a clue what it could be.

"Morning," John called in greeting as he came out of the restroom.

Sherlock hummed in response, slightly surprised that John seemed so calm after the recent events. Usually it was John's manner to act a bit awkward or defensive whenever his sexuality was called into question, or when Sherlock accidentally overstepped that "friendship" line of physicality.

"Tea?" John offered, already flipping on the machine.

"You were right about the weather," Sherlock huffed in lieu of a response. John knew the answer to that anyway, voicing it was simply a formality.

"Was I now?" John asked absently.

"The roads are dreadful. We're snowed in. This place is just... _hateful,_ " Sherlock complained.

"It's winter, now stop whining and get dressed. You can't walk down to breakfast like that."

"Why would I want breakfast? I ate yesterday, I even _slept._ I'm out of sorts enough as it is, I need to _work_ not _eat_ ," Sherlock griped, diving over the bed to retrieve the laptop.

John just sighed, dropping a teabag into a mug as the machine beeped. "Fine. I'll bring something back up for you for later. Maybe you wouldn't drop like you do if you actually _ate_ regularly."

"That's ridiculous."

"Of course it is. I'm just a doctor after all. I spent years studying the human body just to lie to you about how to improve your health," John quipped.

"Isn't that what doctors do? Charge you for things you don't actually need?"

"You're thinking of mechanics. Now hush and drink your tea. I'll bring something back for you."

Sherlock huffed, but accepted the steaming mug nonetheless. He watched John pull on his shoes and leave the room, seeming for all the world that nothing had happened earlier. This behaviour wasn't right, it didn't fit. He'd expected to be avoided at the very least, for John to be awkward and feign ignorance. At most he had expected a confrontation over this that would end in one of them no longer using the bed. Instead, John had taken it all in stride and was acting as if nothing undesirable had happened at all.

 _Wait_.

Sherlock shook his head, clearing it. Now wasn't the time to overanalyze the complicity that was John Watson. _Now_ was the time to figure out these series of deaths. Important: four people had died, all within close proximity of each other but otherwise with no obvious relations. Important: while originally declared as overdoses, traces of an unknown toxin had been found in all of the victims. Important: Bryan Glass had put up a fight before he died, he also had a meth lab in his basement. The lab hadn't been used in a month, around the same time Jaydon's fund had been stolen and Mr. Glass had tested positive at work.

_Why do they die, Sherlock?_

Yes, why? These were hits, they were connected and carefully selected. But _why?_ There wasn't enough evidence. In fact, there was a surprising _lack_ of evidence to be found. He needed to look at the other victims more closely. There had to be _something._

Sherlock turned to cast a hateful glare towards the window. He wouldn’t be getting anywhere today.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alrighty, here's Chapter 3. There's a bit of technical stuff in there. I wrote this chapter back when I was taking a forensics course (whoa that was a year ago) and we were going over different applications for hair samples in forensics analysts work. I thought it was neat and really wanted to find a way to throw it into Sunshine. So I've attempted to explain it/apply it to the best of my understanding. Can't claim to be 100% accurate, but it's kind of the general idea? Just a little tid bit to make Sherlock look like he knows stuff. We actually learned about this by watching a film over this lady who'd been slipping rat poison into her husband's drink before work everyday and they figured it out by testing his hair for chemical records. Neat. Awful wife though.  
> Anyhoo, moving on. "Black ice" is a term we use for ice that is extremely clear and slick. Kind of a problem out here. Weather in general is a problem. Sherlock and John were referring to the temp in Celsius. So 20 C = 68 F, -7 C = 19 F. Missouri does that kind of jumping around very frequently. It's the worst.  
> Points to anyone who can guess the password Sherlock couldn't figure out.  
> Also, I have nothing against mechanics (see: John's jibe at them) I just happened to write that bit around the time when I took my car in for an oil change, and all of a sudden the mechanic thought he could trick me into "all new tires, full admissions check, yadda yadda." Funny enough, as soon as my dad walked it he decided the oil change was all the car needed. Nice bloke, eh?  
> Hope you're all enjoying Sunshine so far, next chapter on Sunday as usual. Questions or concerns: come find me on tumblr as zinaide.


	5. Chapter 4

"I can't exactly just send private files through _email_ to you. If you want to look at them, you'll have to come in," Lindner proclaimed sternly. "Not today though, not with the roads this bad. You just stay inside, enjoy a snow day. I'm ordering a new search of the other victims' residences. I'll let you know if we find anything."

Lindner hung up, leaving Sherlock to glare at his phone. Sherlock never thought there would be a time where he wished for Lestrade's presence.

This simply wouldn't do. He'd have to go in, roads be damned. John wouldn't approve, but he didn't really have to wait around to be told that, did he? If Sherlock already _knew_ he would disapprove, then why not skip the long argument that wouldn't change his mind anyway? It made perfect sense to Sherlock, who was already pulling on his shoes and grabbing his coat on the way out the door. He took the stairs - less likely to encounter John that way - and slipped out the lobby doors without a second thought.

His second thought arrived the moment he stepped out onto the pavement and nearly ended up on his backside. The entire sidewalk, which had been dutifully shovelled clear several hours ago, was covered in a slick layer of ice. Sherlock carefully made his way to the Jeep despite the fact that the parking lot wasn't in any better shape. The vehicle was encased in a thin, bumpy sheet of ice. Apparently, at some point in the night, they had been subjected to freezing rain. Sherlock grasped the handle and yanked. It creaked, but held firm. He heaved again, this time breaking the handle free of its shell. The door, as it happened, was even more stubborn. After several minutes of exhausting yanking and attempts to chisel away the ice layer, Sherlock finally admitted defeat and released the handle with a frustrated curse. Looks like he _wouldn't_ be sneaking off today. John would be thrilled.

Sherlock shoved away from the car, almost ending up on his rear _again_ from the action, and began picking his way back across the lot. His phone started buzzing insistently, no doubt John had noticed his absence by now, and Sherlock mulishly ignored it.

As if the Universe was determined to show its displeasure with him today, it was at that moment that a car pulled into the lot and very promptly lost control. Sherlock thoughtlessly jumped out of the path of the careening vehicle and instead onto a patch of slick ice. His teeth clacked together painfully as his skull connected to the pavement, and for a moment the world seemed to stop. He blinked away the black spots dancing on his vision and slowly, agonizingly, pushed himself up. The world seemed to be spinning a bit, and Sherlock swallowed hard to force down his nausea.

The driver of the vehicle hurried over, nearly falling himself on the way, and helped Sherlock sit up.

"Oh my God are you alright?!" He cried, panicked.

"Yes, yes, fine," Sherlock growled, trying to wave him off.

"Oh God. Your head is bleeding. Let me call an ambulance-"

"No! No, I'm fine. John is a doctor."

"John?"

"John- my John. Upstairs! Just... off," Sherlock commanded, pushing him back a bit.

"At least let me help you to your room," the man pleaded.

Sherlock nodded, head pounding, but only because his legs didn't feel quite steady. The man helped him up and steered him towards the hotel. His vehicle, a U.S. Postal Truck as it happened, sat in idle without him. Sherlock's depth perception was apparently a bit off, as he missed the third-floor button in the elevator twice before managing to press it. John was standing outside their room, expression furious as he knocked for what was obviously not the first time.

"John!" Sherlock called out, then winced at the loudness of it.

John turned on him and his anger immediately snapped to concern. He rushed forward to wrap an arm around Sherlock's waist, taking his weight from the postman.

"What happened?" He demanded.

"He came out from between the cars as I was pulling in and lost control on the ice. He tried to move out of the way, fell and hit his head," the driver explained, voice filled with guilt.

"Why didn't you call an ambulance?"

"I tried, he wouldn't let me. Said his John was a doctor upstairs. You _are_ John, yeah?"

John nodded, thanking the man for bringing him up, and started half-carrying, half-dragging Sherlock back to their door. It took an awkward moment for him to fish the room key out of Sherlock's pocket, and the detective had decided he was rather sleepy and would very much like to fall asleep on the other man. John maneuvered them through the door and settled him into the armchair.

"What the _hell_ were you doing in the parking lot, Sherlock?" John demanded, then paused. "You were trying to leave, weren't you?"

"That stupid officer won't send me the files," Sherlock griped. "He said I had to come in to see them-"

"So you were just going to leave without me then? Not even answer your phone to tell me you'd left, or, I don't know, _give me a room key so I could get back in either._ "

Sherlock frowned, looking up blearily at the fuming doctor. "I was coming back."

"Yes, and you almost got hit by a car and now you probably have a concussion. That's going to mean _no_ working for the rest of the day, maybe even into tomorrow, you get that right?" John snapped, his fingers prodding gently in contrast to his sharp tone.

Sherlock let out a cry of protest and immediately regretted it.

"That's what you get, you big idiot," John grumbled, but his voice had softened now. "Keep your eyes open, I'm going to grab you some ice and painkillers. Doesn't look like you cracked your skull, just got a nick from a rock or something on the ground. I'd say a very minor concussion, if at all."

John left his side to gather a bag of ice from the machine down the hall and wrapped it in a hand towel before holding it against the welt already forming on the side of Sherlock's head. He leaned into the cool pressure and swallowed the proffered pills without complaint.

"Why were you coming back?" John asked.

Sherlock frowned, thinking. "I... I don't know."

"Did you forget something?"

"I don't think so. I can't remember. There was something wrong, I was coming back to you," Sherlock grimaced, "I don't remember."

It was John who was frowning now, eyeing Sherlock with concern. "Did you lose consciousness at any point?"

"No. There were stars though."

John let out a long, strained sigh and lifted Sherlock's hand to take his place on the ice. He went over to his luggage, pulling out his first aid kit and returning with a penlight. The bright light made his head ache even more, but Sherlock kept his head up so John could check his eyes. John pulled the bag away, gently parting through Sherlock's curls to prod at the lump.

"You've got quite an egg forming," John commented with a sympathetic grimace. "Keep that ice on it."

Sherlock grumbled out a half-hearted response and returned the ice to his head.

"This is karma, you know," John stated as he returned his pen to the kit.

"Don't be ridiculous."

"Really? You decide to trot off without me, knowing fully well that I would have stopped you from going out had I known, get yourself hurt while you're out there and have to be dragged back to me by a stranger, and you don't find any of that karma upon yourself?" John asked incredulously.

"No such thing. Go call Lindner and convince him to give me those files," Sherlock grumbled, then paused. "Please."

"Ah, no. I'm going to call him, but that's to tell him you're an idiot. If you're lucky he might bring them around tomorrow once the roads are better," John assured.

Sherlock glared at him with as much distaste as his aching head would allow. John leveled him with a stern look and picked up his phone to start dialing.

* * *

The pain in his head had eased within the next hour, and he felt completely fine save for some slight dizziness if he stood or moved a bit too quickly. John, despite Sherlock's rapid recovery, was adamant that they were spending the rest of the day in the room. No amount of bribery, sulking, explosive shouting, or whatever other attempts of coercion Sherlock employed could sway the man. Finally, Sherlock accepted defeat by flopping heavily on the bed, face down in the pillow. John, who was already reclining against the headboard to watch television, jolted a bit but quickly recovered himself.

"Stop pouting," John ordered mildly, not looking down at him, "and get back to researching or hacking things you're not supposed to be into and that I don't know about."

Sherlock groaned into the pillow. "I need to see the _files_ , John!"

"Well, good thing they'll keep till tomorrow then, isn't it? You weren't going to be able to see them today anyway, and you've cemented that fact by getting yourself concussed, so stop complaining about it and do something productive with your day in, will you?" John sighed.

"Like _what?"_

"Take a hot bath, research, hack something-"

"A _bath?_ Really? _That_ is your idea of productive?"

"If it'd relax you enough to stop being a prick it'd be productive to your continued living," John offered darkly.

Sherlock turned his face out of the pillow to eye him warily. John stared resolutely ahead at the television, but there was a hint of a crinkle around his eyes; he was amused. Sherlock rolled over once, then again until he was sprawled half on top of his friend. John froze, tensing while simultaneously trying to pretend he didn't care at all.

"How could bathing be relaxing?" Sherlock questioned, ignoring John's discomfort in favour of resting his chin on the man's chest and glaring up at him.

The question seemed to surprise him enough to forget their positions and John finally looked down at him.

"You've never run a hot bath and just... lazed around in it?" He asked incredulously.

"Of course not. What would be the point of just sitting in water? It's not cleansing or anything," Sherlock added.

 Curiosity had taken up the place of boredom now. Sherlock would never ask after something he knew "normal" people did if it was anyone else, but John had always explained without judgement. Well, besides surprise and disbelief at time, and something akin to pity at others, but he wasn't condescending about it. He knew that if the complexities of human behaviour ever stumped him, he could reliably turn to John for answers.

 "Alright, up," John ordered, shoving at him. "Get up."

 "What? Why?" Sherlock asked as he rolled away.

 "There's a jacuzzi downstairs by the pool, indoor of course. We're going," He announced.

 "I don't even have anything to wear for that-"

 "Yes you do. I looked up this hotel before we left London, so I grabbed swim trunks for both of us. Now go get changed and hunt down some towels, would you?"

 Sherlock complied, still confused and uncertain by this sudden development. He knew, in theory, what a jacuzzi was and that people enjoyed them, he had just never seen the point of indulging in one. If it meant getting out of this room though... Sherlock was suddenly a lot more eager for this outing. Five minutes later, he was trotting down the hallway after John, clad in swim shorts and a t-shirt with a towel draped over his arm, and fighting to continue showing indifference over the whole endeavour. John, of course, saw right through him, and gave him a soft smile while they took the lift down to the lobby. The room was, blessedly. empty of all people, and Sherlock could see fragile wisps of steam rising off the circular pool in the corner of the room.

 It was to this pool that John beelined for, dropping his towel on a neighbouring chair. He tested the water with his foot, deemed it satisfactory, and his shirt promptly joined the towel before he settled in. Sherlock approached a bit more slowly, eyeing the water, and left his own towel and shirt with John's. Still, he hesitated before carefully stepping in.

 The water was hot, but just on the downside of scalding. Upon settling on the seat across from John, the water came up to Sherlock's collarbones.

 "Well... What do you think?" John asked, suppressing a smile.

 "It's... nice," Sherlock said slowly. "Is this it?"

 "Not quite."

 John reached around behind himself and pressed a button. The water suddenly began moving and bubbling, accompanied by a whirring sound. Sherlock would deny jumping half a foot out of the water until the day he died, and John would argue that he nearly jumped out of the jacuzzi entirely. Several minutes later, after John had managed to stop laughing and Sherlock had begrudgingly smiled too, able to admit he had been a bit ridiculous,  John had settled back against his seat and was watching Sherlock's reactions. Sherlock still wasn't too sure how he felt about the swirling water and ever increasing foam, but he was slowly relaxing into it.

 "Well, what do you think?" John asked.

 "I'm not sure. What am I supposed to do?" Sherlock questioned, uncertain.

 "Nothing, you're doing it. This is pretty much it, you just sit and talk, or don't talk," John added. "Doesn't really matter as long as you're relaxed I guess."

 Sherlock nodded, processing that, and slowly sank down into the seat more, stretching out his legs until he felt his foot brush John's. John nudged him back, closing his eyes and letting out a contented sigh. Sherlock decided now would be a perfect time to head into his mind palace and sort through the toxicology reports just one last time. Something about the unknown toxin's signature just wasn't adding up. He pulled up every poison and drug signature he'd ever dealt with and began comparing them to the unknown. Over a half hour later he'd run through the list twice and still came up blank.

 His eyes snapped open, finding John already watching him, and sat up straighter.

 "It's not a drug," Sherlock announced, "or a poison. Not any that I know of at least."

 "Sorry, what?" John asked, startled.

 "There wasn't enough cocaine in Mr. Glass to have killed him, it was the unknown in combination to it that finished him off. They've been running every drug and poison comparison possible and still haven't found a match, I just did my own comparison of everything I've ever encountered against it to the same result. So, it's not a drug, unless it's something new," Sherlock theorized.

 "So it's... some new drug on the market?"

 "Potentially. It's not behaving like a drug though..."

 "You said the cocaine was of pure concentration, so maybe they had access to a pure concentration of something else that doesn't mix well with cocaine or a venom or something," John mused aloud.

 Sherlock froze. "Say that again, the last bit."

 "Venom or something?" John repeated. "You think it might be venom?"

 "Possibly... I need to do some more research," Sherlock decided, starting to sit up.

 John looked down at the now still water with a disappointed, almost wistful look. Sherlock casually reached out and pressed a button to turn back on the jets, this time causing John to startle. He looked up, eyes questioning and just on the edge of hopeful.

 "I thought you said you needed to do some more research?" He asked.

 "I did," Sherlock confirmed, leaning back against the side of the tub. "Nothing that can't wait... Although it _does_ say you should only be in here for thirty minutes at a time..."

 "No one ever listens to that."

 "Didn't think so."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again. Here's chapter four for ya. Don't have another long rant/forensics lesson this week, I'm just a sucker for John introducing Sherlock to new things.


	6. Chapter 5

Sherlock shifted from foot to foot, pulling his damp towel more tightly around his shoulders and repressing a shiver. John was struggling to get the key card in the door while keeping hold of his own towel and shirt. Finally, the lock clicked and they tumbled through into the marginally warmer room. John quickly crossed the room to crank up the heater, tossing his waterlogged towel on a chair in exchange for a bathrobe.

“You’re going to want to have a shower,” John advised. “These places over chlorinate their water.”

The idea of getting _more_ wet was extremely unappealing, but Sherlock’s skin was beginning to feel distinctly unclean the more the water dried. He shuffled off to take what might have been the quickest and most efficient shower of his life, and was in the process of scruffling his hair with a towel when he realized he’d neglected to bring a change of clothes. Sherlock wrapped a towel around his waist and slipped out into the room.

John was still standing over the heater, his back to the room, and Sherlock moved over to join him.

“Shower’s all yours,” He announced, stepping a bit closer to the heater.

“Thanks,” John said and finally looked up.

John froze, his gaze having gone no higher than Sherlock’s chest. Sherlock glanced down at himself, confused. He didn’t see anything amiss, and this was hardly the first time John had seen him without a shirt, wasn’t it?

“John?” He asked cautiously.

John jerked out of his daze, eyes now raising to meet Sherlock’s. He looked… off-balanced somehow. A flush was creeping up his neck as he averted his gaze, giving a firm nod.

“Right. Thanks,” He repeated and slipped passed Sherlock, seemingly making a conscious effort to avoid touching him in the process.

Sherlock remained where he was for several seconds after John had closed himself into the bathroom, baffled. He turned to the full-length mirror on the wall, trying to find what had caused such a reaction. His pale, thin torso looked even more gaunt in the dull lighting that filtered through the partially drawn curtains, and the scars that decorated him stood out in stark contrast to the surrounding skin. One in particular, a long line that wrapped around his ribcage as a memento to his time in Serbia, was still an ugly pink colour. The scar from the bullet was actually fairly neat and had mostly faded by now.

Sherlock frowned, fingers skimming one of the marks. They weren’t horrible, and John had seen most of them before… perhaps not up close though. Still, John had seen his fair share of scars, both horrible and clean, so that couldn’t have been what prompted such a reaction. Although the blush said John was… uncomfortable, maybe? Perhaps the events from this morning were finally coming around? Sherlock was aware that the sort of close contact they usually kept wasn’t exactly something “normal” friends or flatmates shared, but it had never been too much of an issue before. For all John’s cries of “not gay” and “not his date,” John had always mostly accepted Sherlock’s ignorance of boundaries.

Sherlock spared his reflection one last glance and quickly dressed, making a mental vow to allow some distance between them. Perhaps that would make John more comfortable.

His phone was blinking from the bedside table with new messages, most simple emails from his website about boring clients with dull problems, but a few of actual importance that he took the time to respond to. There was one email from Seven that caught his eye. It was brief, simply updating him that no results had come from the tests, and at this point he was open for advice because he didn’t believe it was a drug but didn’t know where to try next. Sherlock decided further research would be required before he could respond to that one, and was well into it by the time John emerged from the bathroom, fully dressed and hair still damp. John sat on the bed, pulling out his own computer - Sherlock was actually using his own for once as part of his mental agreement.

“Anything you want me to look up?” John asked.

Sherlock glanced up at him, finding himself unable to read the other man’s expression. “Yes, actually. If you could look into the effects of neurotoxins, particularly that found in adolescent rattlesnakes, that would be lovely,” Sherlock agreed. “I’m currently looking into cottonmouths, but I don’t believe it’s quite right.”

“And why are we looking at snakes?”

“You did say venom. There are three different types of rattlesnake in Missouri: the western pygmy, the massasauga, and the timber. Copperheads are most common as far as venomous snakes go here, and then there’s the cottonmouth- apparently it’s also called a water moccasin,” Sherlock listed, glancing down at his search again. “I would put my bet on the unknown being venom from a younger rattlesnake, as they retain neurotoxins instead of hemotoxins. I’ve just sent a text to Seven to have him test for it.”

“There weren’t any puncture wounds on Glass’s body, except for where the cocaine was injected,” John mentioned thoughtfully.

“Not bitten then… But the venom had to have been injected, it’s harmless when ingested. Whoever is doing this has access to someone who can milk snakes. That narrows things down a bit.”

“Does it?”

“How many people do you know that regularly milk venomous snakes?”

“Do remember where we are, Sherlock. It’s probably not as uncommon here as you’d think. Luckily, we’re not exactly in the country, so _that_ will narrow things down a bit. Just have to find a bloke with an odd hobby, visit the zoo maybe. Do they have snake sanctuaries?” John wondered aloud.

Sherlock simply shrugged, internally missing the convenience and familiarity of London. They lapsed into silence, broken only occasionally when one found something of potential interest. Seven sent back a text saying the tests were underway, and that he’d recheck the body for any bite wounds. All that was left to do now was to wait. Sherlock hated waiting.

* * *

Sherlock woke to the buzzing of his phone, and found himself restrained by an arm slung over his waist when he attempted to reach for it. He glanced back at the still sleeping man, frowning. It would seem, despite the foot of space he had left between them during the night, they’d ended up as they had before. Slowly, and with great care, Sherlock slipped out from under John’s arm to retrieve the phone. He pulled on his coat before stepping out onto the balcony to answer the call. He noticed a brief text from Seven confirming that it was indeed rattlesnake venom in Glass’s system. The call, however, was from Lindner.

“I do hope whatever you’re calling for is important enough for four in the morning, Detective,” Sherlock grumbled when he answered.

Although Sherlock still didn’t sleep much when he was working, he’d discovered rest to actually be beneficial while he was “away,” and was now prone to fits of crabbiness (as John called it) if he was awoken before he was ready to be up.

“I believe it is,” Lindner replied, sounding both exhausted and wide awake. “There’s been another victim.”

Sherlock perked up at this. “They’re still alive, aren’t they?”

“They are. I got the report from Seven last night, snake venom he said. We have you to thank for that I gathered. Not an hour after his report came in we got a call from some guy who was high out of his mind, said he had venom in his system but that he hadn’t been bitten. It was almost dismissed completely as just some crazy druggy, but my coworker mentioned it to me so I took a look. He’s in the hospital now, but he should live. Apparently he works with snakes, keeps several venomous ones as pets, and had antivenom on hand,” Lindner explained.

“Keep him in custody, we need to question him. He’s involved in this somehow, and someone tried to get rid of him quickly. There’s a leak. Also, I need to see the other reports immediately,” Sherlock decided firmly.

“Come in to the station as soon as you can, I’m hiring you as a consultant on this case. Officially.”

“Good. We’ll be there shortly.”

Sherlock rung off and stepped back into the room. John was sitting up now, rubbing sleep from his eyes and looking up at Sherlock expectantly.

“Time to go?” He asked.

“Time to go,” Sherlock confirmed.

They were both dressed and striding out of the hotel under fifteen minutes later, carefully navigating the few remaining patches of ice. There was a brief argument over whether Sherlock was well enough to drive or not, which Sherlock triumphantly won, and an even briefer stop to pick up coffee at John’s insistence. They reached the police precinct quickly enough and were met in the lobby by Detective Lindner, who led them back to his office.

“Tell me more about this snake handler,” Sherlock requested once they’d entered the small, surprisingly neat room.

“His name is Jack Lara, thirty-two year old hispanic male, divorced, no children, and works with a rescue group in St. Louis County,” Lindner read, flipping through a file on his desk. “He has a license for keeping venomous snakes.”

“Is he well enough to speak to?” Sherlock pressed.

“Not just yet, Mr. Lara is in critical care currently. If he hadn’t had antivenom on hand… Well, he has no history of drug use, which is what made me connect him to the case. What do you think?” Lindner asked, sitting back in his chair with a tired sigh.

“He’s involved with this to some extent, I’ll need to question him to figure out how deeply. There’s a leak in this case somewhere. I sent a text to Seven instructing him to test for venoms not seven hours ago, and a snake handler is nearly killed by a cocaine overdose mixed with venom shortly after? They were trying to get rid of him,” Sherlock determined. “I need to see the files on the others, their houses too if possible.”

“Well, that’s where this gets more interesting, doesn’t it? After you found that lab at Glass’s place, I sent some men back to the other houses to snoop around a bit more. They’re not you, granted, but one found something of interest,” Lindner said, pulling out another file and pushing it towards them.

Sherlock flipped it open immediately. Helen McClaire, age thirty-seven, single mother of an out-of-state university student, worked part-time at the Botanical Gardens, found dead in her apartment from a cocaine overdose with an unknown compound. That had been a month before Ms. Chambers emailed them. At the bottom of the file, added fairly recently it would seem, an added note.

“Ms. McClaire had a hidden marijuana garden in her flat,” Sherlock noted. “Son in college, debts to be paid and knowledge of gardening in hand… Lara had access to potent venoms and the knowhow to milk it, and Glass…”

He snatched up the file on Bryan Glass, finding exactly what he expected. “Mr. Glass majored in chemistry in university. These people were sources, not dealing directly, but selling to a bigger group for certain. It’s a drug ring.”

John put a hand briefly on Sherlock’s elbow, a silent request to contain his excitement, and reached over to retrieve the other files and skim them.

“Christian Jones, worked for a labware manufacturing company… Alison O’Hara, chemistry teacher at St. Louis University… But why are they dead? Why would they kill off their sources?” John wondered.

“No loose ends, moving business perhaps? We need to talk to Lara as soon as he’s well enough. Rings like this will be extensive, and now that they know their methods have been caught out they won’t be as clean about disposing the rest of them,” Sherlock mused.

“Yes, but _w_ ho are they sourcing for?” Lindner inquired.

“Now would be a good time to start looking into any addicts you’ve gotten in recently, focus on the upper-middle class. With that level of purity, they won’t be selling to the average street crowd. Also, Lara can point us to his contact,” Sherlock added. “I’d like to see the homes of the other victims, and have toxicology re-run tests for venom if you will.”

Lindner fired off a quick email before agreeing to take them to the houses. First off was Helen McClaire’s home, in which was nothing more than the small garden hidden away in her bedroom and an appalling number of crucifixes in every room. Jones had a large number of flasks, beakers, and test tubes stored throughout the house, though that was hardly damning evidence on its own. It was John who discovered a store of packaged sterile needles and tubing in an obscure kitchen cabinet. By the time they finished searching the last two houses, it was well past noon and all they had to show for it was the needles and a few empty saline bags from O’Hara’s apartment. While it wasn’t much, it was enough for Sherlock to now firmly say that all four were connected to this operation.

Upon John’s insistence, they met with Nicole and Jaydon for a late lunch in order to update them on the case. Sherlock found this a tremendous waste of time but he begrudgingly agreed, as they had nothing else to go on until Lara was stable enough to question. He allowed John to do most of the explaining, piping up only to add what he felt to be important details or correct the other man’s terminology. While Ms. Chambers was understandably shocked by the news, Jaydon appeared unimpressed.

“That explains a lot, actually,” He remarked once John had finished. “Bryan started avoiding taking me back to his house a bit before he left for good. I had assumed he had some new lady friend that he didn’t want me to see, but I guess he just didn’t want to chance me finding his little… lab.”

“He may have been trying to protect you,” John interjected. “Meth labs are extremely volatile.”

Jaydon shrugged, staring down at the barely touched sandwich in front of him. He remained silent for the rest of the conversation, eventually dismissing himself to go to work. Ms. Chambers stared after him with worry.

“He’s been taking all of this really hard. For all he rants on about having disowned Bryan, he still loved him. Used to think Bryan had hung the moon,” She recounted sadly.

Sherlock tuned out as John replied with the appropriate amount of sympathy and doctorly advice. Well, that’s how it started at least. Ms. Chambers was blatantly interested and not even trying to hide it. Not four minutes later, Sherlock abruptly stood and strode out of the café, leaving John make a quick apology and run after. He ignored John’s requests for an explanation during the drive back to the hotel, and was successful up until the point John cornered him in the elevator.

“You _will_ answer me, Sherlock,” John snapped.

“Will I now, _Captain_ Watson?” Sherlock sniped back.

“ _Yes._ Now what the hell was that back there, hm?” He demanded.

“And to what, exactly, are you referring?” Sherlock sighed with impatience.

“You storming off like that-”

“I did not _storm_ off like anything-”

“Getting up and rudely leaving in the middle of a conversation is quite definitely considered storming off-”

“I wasn’t part of any conversation-”

“Well _I_ was-”

“Yes, so sorry to have interrupted your flirting time. You can hardly expect me to sit there and listen to you and Chambers ‘sympathize’ over each other when there’s actual _work_ to be done,” Sherlock spat. “Or have you forgotten that there is still a murderer on the loose? Not to mention Jaydon’s funding, or is that not important anymore either?”

The doors opened to their floor then, and Sherlock swept passed the dumbstruck man. He had a brief moment to berate himself over not having taken his own room key this morning as he waited for John to unlock the door. John let them in without a word, his brow furrowed in thought, and immediately disappeared into the bathroom. Sherlock stared at the closed door, torn between irritation and confusion, and snatched up his pack of cigarettes. Before he could even strike a match to light it, the cigarette was plucked from his lips and tossed into a nearby bin. Sherlock let out a cry of protest as his pack was also taken, though that was set on the t.v. stand rather than sent into the bin.

Not for the first time, Sherlock was certain John had a secret sixth sense that alerted him every time Sherlock was about to light up so that he could intervene.

“You were jealous,” John declared.

“Jealous? Of what?” Sherlock snapped back, confusion now predominating the irritation.

“Them. Nicole, the women at the market the other day-”

“It wasn’t just _women_ at the market that were eyeing you-” Sherlock started to object, cutting himself off when his mind caught up to his mouth.

“Ah, so you admit it! You were jealous. I knew you were acting off on the drive home… Wait, why are you jealous?” John stopped, baffled.

Sherlock remained frozen, unable to speak even if he knew what to say. John had gone still as well, though he was still out of thoughtfulness rather than terror, and was staring at Sherlock. Everything seemed to have just slammed to a standstill.

“It’s not just at the market either, this happens at home too,” John noted, slowly, considering this. “Are you… afraid?”

This jared Sherlock back enough to respond. “Afraid? What could I be afraid of? Don’t be ridiculous, John-”

“Well, you act like this any time someone other than _you_ occupies my time, dates or otherwise, so what is it?” John pressed, not quite upset as much as curious.

Sherlock fell silent again, accepting and waiting for the inevitable. What that was, however, he didn’t quite know. John would reach a conclusion here, and it would either be dead on or not and Sherlock wasn’t even sure himself what it would be. He didn’t understand _why_ he was jealous, he just knew he was. What it came down to, in the end, is that he couldn’t stand the idea of John leaving, and all of those girlfriends or “interested others” could lead to that.

Whatever John saw on Sherlock’s face seemed to be an answer enough. His shoulders slumped and he shook his head slowly, a sad smile on his lips.

“I’m not about to run off and abandon you, you know that right? I would’ve thought the whole thing with Mary would have shown you that, before I moved back in I mean. You’re my best friend, of course I’m not going to leave,” John laughed sadly.

And that was it, right on the head of the nail. “Friend.” It always came back to that. And Sherlock understood it now, after having heard it aloud, he understood _why._ Friend just wasn’t enough anymore, was it? In fact, it hadn’t been for quite a while now. He was jealous of all of the attention John received because, even though they weren’t in any official capacity as such, John was _his_ . He wanted the sorts of attentions John gave to his dates to be aimed at _him_ , and he wanted to be able to return it. He wanted that, and all it entitled, and he was helpless as to acquiring it.

John was still watching him, waiting for a response of some kind, and Sherlock could only nod slightly. He nodded again, more firmly, and began to turn back towards the door.

“Right,” Sherlock said, clearing his throat when his voice came out weak and trying again. “Right, yes… Thank you… Right, I think I saw a café across the lot. I’m dying for a cuppa.”

Sherlock snatched up his pack of cigarettes and flew out the door, not waiting for John to respond. The doctor called after him, but Sherlock was already flying down the stairway before John had even gotten out of their room. Once outside, Sherlock hurried around to the back of the building instead of heading towards the little café.

He needed time, just a bit of time and a smoke or two. Yes, a cigarette would be heavenly just now.

It would appear that the Universe itself was also against Sherlock being allowed a cigarette. Right as his match rose to the roll between his lips, his phone began to ring. Sherlock sighed, shaking out the match and digging out his phone. To his surprise, it was Lindner calling, not John. Sherlock stuffed the cigarette back into its carton before answering, simultaneously relieved and incredibly frustrated.

“Yes?” Sherlock answered, unintentionally harsh.

“Thought you’d like to know, Lara is awake and able to speak now. He’s agreed to see you,” Lindner informed him. “I’ll give you the address, if you could come now that’d be great. I’m already up here.”

What a blessedly conveniently timed distraction. Sherlock agreed, memorizing the address and hanging up. He stopped to grab teas from the café, ordering one he knew would be to John’s taste in lieu of an apology. He found John standing outside the doors of the hotel, phone in hand and very clearly stressed. The doctor’s head snapped up upon Sherlock’s approach, instant relief washing away the concern on his face.

“There you are. Sherlock, are you-”

Sherlock cut him off by pressing the cup into his hands. “Lindner called, we need to go see Lara. Do you have everything you need? Good, let’s go.”

He spun on his heel, striding off towards the Jeep without waiting for further response. John had to half-jog to keep up. Thankfully, he seemed to drop the issue of before with no more than a small sigh. It would undoubtedly come back up later, but for now, it was time to work.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jack Lara is based off an old band buddy of mine, because why not friend-insert. Also, a quick Happy Birthday shout-out to the real Jaydon, my lovely Wife, who is becoming an old person this Tuesday.  
> Sorry for the delay on this update, I've recently become the proud momma of two rabbits, and this morning they decided to just destroy literally everything. They are the worst and I love them.


	7. Chapter 6

Sherlock might have driven a bit recklessly on the way to the hospital, recklessly enough for John to have a white-knuckled grip on the door. The man let out a shaky sigh of relief once the vehicle was in park, and all but poured himself out. Sherlock half expected him to kiss the ground while he was at it. And John called _him_ over-dramatic.

Lindner met them in the lobby, leading the way up and only commenting once on the lack of colour in John’s face. John, only half teasing, simply insulted Sherlock’s driving.

“Yes, yes,” Sherlock said impatiently, “I have quite obviously traumatized the war hero with my driving skills. Which way to Mr. Lara’s room, Detective?”

John shot him a look, but followed along without a comment. Mr. Lara was sitting up, propped up by pillows with a small cup of ice chips on the tray next to him. He looked up as they entered, expression wary but welcoming, and pushed a button to raise his bed up more.

“Mr. Lara, this is our Consulting Detective Sherlock Holmes and his partner Doctor John Watson,” Lindner introduced. “They have a few questions for you if you don’t mind.”

“Oh, hello,” Lara greeted. “I don’t mind.”

Sherlock approached the bed, hands clasped loosely behind him. “How about we start at the beginning?  Can you tell us how you came to be… here?”

“Yes, well… I work with venomous snakes, both at home and at work, and I do have people that I supply venom too. I have the paperwork for all of these transactions, you can see them, and all of them are involved in either research or creating antivenins. The people I started working with… six months ago? Maybe a bit longer, I can’t remember, but they checked out like that too. Said they were making antivenin, and I checked their background and all that. I didn’t notice anything amiss until they started demanding larger quantities, and I refused. You can only take so much from these snakes at once, and no one else had ever demanded as much as they were,” Lara added protectively. “Last month I told them that was it, I wasn’t going to be doing business anymore and they needed to go elsewhere. I never had contact with the head of whatever company they were running, they just sent the same person to do pickups. Her name was Eliza Deyr.”

“Was that her legal name?” John asked.

Lara shrugged. “Can’t say. She filled out all the paperwork right though.”

“Do continue,” Sherlock urged.

“Of course… I hadn’t heard from them since I cut off our arrangement until Eliza showed up at my door the other night. She said that they sent her to sort out a few things with our old contract. I invited her in, and we were going over bits of the contract. I don’t know how he got in, I didn’t hear him enter, but there was suddenly this slimeball of a man holding a gun against my head and Eliza was tying me to a chair. She told me what they were going to do, that they were going to make me look like some normal overdose, and that it was the venom I’d been supplying them with that was actually going to kill me.

“She injected me with the stuff, then they waited until it’d really kicked in before untying me and leaving. I guess they thought I was done for. I keep antivenins on me at all times, just in case. Can never be too careful in my line of work, you know? The paramedics didn’t believe me when I tried telling them what happened. They were rather rude actually, the nurses too until Detective Lindner showed up. And now here I am, feeling like crap and with a new addiction I never wanted,” Lara added this last bit with an undertone of anger.

“The copies of your transactions and deals, where are they?” Sherlock asked.

“I keep them all in a locked file cabinet in my home office. The nurse has my keys in a bag somewhere, it’s the smallest one on the ring.”

Lindner immediately turned to retrieve the bag from the other side of the room, pocketing the keys from within. John asked after Lara’s health, forever the doctor, and took a moment to look over his charts.

“You’ll want to put Mr. Lara under protection,” Sherlock instructed.

Lara’s gaze snapped around to him. “Protection? Why?”

“Whoever is running this is cleaning up shop, Mr. Lara. They’ve already disposed of several other suppliers, and by now they’ll have been made aware that you are still alive… Not a mistake that’s likely to be made again,” Sherlock warned.

Lindner nodded in agreement. “I’ll have an officer posted on the door until he’s discharged, then we’ll figure it out from there. Shall we go get those files?”

Sherlock turned back to Lara, offering his hand. The man’s grip was a bit weaker than expected, but that could very easily just have been from his recent ordeal. He accepted Sherlock’s card with a smile, promising to call if he remembered anything else. His exchange with John was curiously less warm than it had been with Sherlock. They followed Lindner out, leaving a uniformed officer at the door.

The drive to Lara’s house was made in silence, John sneaking glances at Sherlock every few minutes and Sherlock staring resolutely at the road. By the time Sherlock pulled into the driveway, a palpable tension had settled in the car. Sherlock decided to feign ignorance.

Case first, impending relationship disaster later.

John and Detective Lindner stood as far back as the small home office would allow, watching the consulting detective tear through the office with increasing irritation. The front door had been ajar when they arrived, broken in from the outside, and the office ransacked well before Sherlock had even gotten a go at it. Whatever files Lara had once kept were either taken or destroyed. Sherlock, allowing the pent of irritation of the day to explode into his search, was tearing through the office in hopes of finding just one paper that could point them in the right direction.

After ten minutes of destruction and swearing, John finally stepped forward to soothe the detective.

“Sherlock… _Sherlock_ , it’s gone,” John said firmly, catching his elbow.

“I _know!_ But there has to be _something_ ,” He insisted, eyes now landing on the computer. “Lindner, call Lara. See if he kept any digital records. If he did, find out his password. I could guess it easily enough, but courts don’t tend to like you obtaining evidence that way.”

Lindner rolled his eyes, but pulled out his phone to make the call and stepped out of the room. Sherlock threw himself into the rolling chair with an aggravated groan. John sighed, walking over to stand behind him and resting his hands on the back of the chair.

“This isn’t that big of a set back, you know. Whatever documents you might have found, they were bound to be fake anyways,” John pointed out.

“Unless we can find this _Eliza_ woman or some other supplier or client _before_ they’re killed, we have absolutely no connections to this ring. We have _nothing!”_ Sherlock snarled. “At this rate the only way we’re going to get more information is from the next body!”

At that moment, Lindner came back into the room, sliding his phone into his pocket with a seemingly permanent frown set on his face. Sherlock straightened up, stomach sinking.

“What? What is it?” Sherlock demanded.

“Jack Lara is dead,” Lindner announced tightly.

“How?”

“He was shot. My man on the door was found unconscious in the room, blow to the back of the head. A nurse saw a man in a navy blue uniform enter the room with him, she thought it was another officer,” Lindner detailed, rubbing his temples. “The nurse was making her rounds when she found them… He must have used a silencer, no one heard a thing.”

Sherlock sank back into the chair, barely noticing that John’s hand had moved to grip his shoulder. They sat in resigned silence for what felt like ages before Sherlock finally sparked back into motion. He turned to the cluttered desk and flicked on Lara’s computer. It was an older type, complete with tower and bulky monitor, but it seemed to be functioning adequately. It took only a brief glance at the photos and office decorations to guess the password, along with a brief jolt into the memory of the car ride earlier and the terrible song that had been on the radio, and Sherlock’s opinion of Mr. Lara immediately soured slightly when it was accepted. (‘myanacondadont’ was hardly a respectable passcode).

It took another five minutes to find anything of use, that being a brief series of email correspondence between Lara and Deyr, and a few moments longer to locate the contact book in the ancient computer. There was no address under her name, only an email and phone number. Sherlock took screenshots of all of it to print out and closed down the computer. He handed copies to Lindner.

“See what you can get out of this,” Sherlock requested. “I’m going to look over those other files in more depth, you know where to find me.”

Sherlock stood, sparing a moment to tidy up the desk a bit before making his dramatic sweep from the room. John followed a bit more slowly, oddly subdued. He remained quiet during the drive, only offering a slightly confused look at Sherlock when they pulled into a gas station instead of continuing on to the hotel. John remained in the car, leaving Sherlock to fill the tank and head inside to pay. There was a surprising amount of food, both healthy and questionable, and one small pastry display in particular caught his eye. Upon returning to the Jeep, Sherlock dropped a small tub of donut holes in John’s lap without a word.

The man startled, hands fumbling the container for a moment, and he stared at it in confusion. Sherlock suppressed a grin of satisfaction when a small, soft smile pulled up John’s lips. The smile was directed down at the container, but Sherlock felt it’s warmth nonetheless. The remainder of the drive back was made in silence, but it was no longer an oppressive, solemn silence.

“Sherlock,” John started, closing the room door behind them, “are you alright?”

“What? Why wouldn’t I be?” Sherlock asked, confused. “Over Lara? Well, it is a setback, granted, but-”

“No, no… Not Lara, no. This morning,” John corrected.

Sherlock tensed slightly. “What about it?”

John let out a growl of frustration.

“You know what! Just… I don’t know what it was exactly that I said that upset you, but I know I _did_ somehow so… Are you alright?” John pressed, looking up at him.

Sherlock made the mistake of meeting his gaze and felt something splinter in him. How in the world had he ever managed to ensnare this man at his side? More so, how had this man come to actually _enjoy_ Sherlock’s company, to care for him even? It was new, having a nonrelative genuinely _care_ for him in the way John does.

Let it be known that there are occasions upon which Sherlock Holmes acts without thinking, without any form of plan or prior consideration. Most of those times, including this one, John Watson was either involved or the direct cause of these impulsive actions.

That said, Sherlock was arguably more shocked and surprised to find John’s face in his hands and their mouths pressed together than John was. As soon as Sherlock’s brain reconnected to the present, he jerked backwards. They stared at each other, eyes wide and lips parted in shock.

“I… Um… Just, f-forget that,” Sherlock stuttered out, digging his fingers into his hair. “Forget that that happened, delete it. I didn’t- I meant to-”

John’s hand reached up to cup the back of his head, yanking Sherlock down into another, briefer kiss. Every single function in Sherlock’s body slammed to a halt with such force that they practically started back-tracking. John pulled back enough to look up at him.

“Sherlock?”

“Y-Yes?”

“Shut up.”

John pulled him back down into a kiss, one hand firm in Sherlock’s hair and the other on his waist. Sherlock’s hands fluttered helplessly at his side before coming to rest on the shorter man’s shoulders. He may or may not have made a soft, broken sound in his throat as he sank into John’s hold. Their kiss gradually deepened, becoming all the more heated as Sherlock’s mind continued to switch off. There was nothing but the bliss of John’s lips on his, the lingering taste of the donuts Sherlock had given him and something that was so distinctly and perfectly _John_ that it made his knees weak. His hands curled into John’s short, soft hair and Sherlock pressed himself fully against the doctor.

Suddenly it was all too much, and yet not nearly enough. Sherlock broke away from the kiss with a gasp for breath, sliding one arm around John’s waist to ensure he remained in place. John placed open mouthed kisses along Sherlock’s jaw and neck, holding Sherlock tightly against him in return. Sherlock began edging backwards, drawing John with him, until he tumbled over onto the bed and John came down on top of him, laughing breathlessly

Sherlock rolled them until he was able to hover over John, taking a moment to simply commit the man’s smiling face to memory. He understood now, these emotions that he’d been unable to put a name on for so long now. If it had been as plain and simple as lust, he could have dealt with this all much more efficiently. The deep affection and care that had come bundled with it is what had muddled everything up into some new, foreign emotion that Sherlock didn’t know how to name let alone what to do with it. He understood now that John Watson had gotten him thoroughly besotted.

He was drawn down into another kiss, and swiftly responded. If this was to be his only chance to know this man, he was going to ensure not a single detail escaped his memory. He moved away from John’s lips to explore along his jaw, to the hollow under his ear, down his neck as low as his shirt would allow. One of them removed John’s shirt after that, though he’ll never be able to recall who, and he began his exploration of the doctor’s chest. Fingers and tongue joined his lips in his gentle study, committing every texture and taste to the John that lived inside his memory palace. He took note of John’s responses, cataloging which zones were more sensitive than others with a grain of hope of being able to reuse this knowledge again.

John’s hand landed on his head, stopping him just as he reached the waistband of his jeans. Sherlock tensed, wondering if he’d gone too far and was about to be thrown out of bed. John shook his head, cheeks flushed and pupils blown wide.

“Protection?” He asked, voice unsteady.

It was Sherlock’s turn to shake his head. “No, didn’t exactly plan for this...“

“We’ll have to run to the store tomorrow… Just… there’s unscented lotion on the sink?” John offered weakly, trying to hide his disappointment.

Sherlock rolled out of bed and hurried to the restroom to find the bottle. Stepping back outside the door, he stood for a moment to just look at him. John smiled at him from where he lay on the bed, not an ounce of self-consciousness to be found. Sherlock was only one step closer to the bed when a peculiar noise caught his attention. There was a loud, buzzing rattling sound coming from underneath the bed.

They both froze.

“John… I believe someone may have broken into our room while we were out,” Sherlock admitted, and now that he was more focused the signs were obvious.

John’s suitcase was open, clothes carelessly ruffled through when they’d been neatly packed before, the sliding door to the balcony was closed when Sherlock had purposely left it cracked in order to receive a breeze, and the imprint of a high heeled shoe on the carpet just inside the door. Sherlock closed his eyes, mentally berating himself.

“You’ll want to get dressed, John,” Sherlock advised with great reluctance. “I need to call Lindner to come collect this snake, and we’re going to have to change hotels.”

John nodded, carefully retrieving his shirt from where it lay on the floor. Sherlock backed away from the bed, then slowly lowered himself until he could get a good look at the rather unhappy serpent. It sat in a tight coil just a foot under the bed, tail trembling to produce a surprisingly loud rattle and tongue flicking. He knew rattlesnakes weren’t particularly aggressive, but they packed a hell of a bite.

Keeping one eye on the snake, Sherlock withdrew his phone.

“Whatever it is, can it wait until morning?” Lindner’s annoyed, sleepy voice growled in answer.

“Not at all. There is a rattlesnake in our hotel room that we would like removed,” Sherlock informed him calmly. “It’s rather upset, so haste would be appreciated for all involved.”

“Shit… It’s a threat, isn’t it?” Lindner guessed, sounding much more awake.

Sherlock bumped his estimation on the detective’s abilities up a bit. “Undoubtedly. John and I will be moving to a new hotel immediately. I’ll fill you in on our location after we’re settled.”

“I’ll get a man over there. If you can, get it locked in somewhere you’re not.”

Sherlock hung up, looking at the now still snake in consideration.

“John, get the pillowcase off of that and come help me.”

John stripped the pillow and carefully got off the bed from the far side. The snake immediately whipped around to face him, tail taking back up its insistent blare and tongue flickering more furiously. Sherlock crept forward a bit.

“Good, keep its attention on you,” Sherlock encouraged.

“You’re not going to try to grab that thing, are you?” John demanded indignantly.

“Of course not. I never _try_ anything. I either do it or I don’t,” Sherlock replied tartly.  

“Sherlock!”

Sherlock shot his hand out, grabbing the snake at the base of its head and gripping tight at the thick body thrashed. He pulled it out from under the bed, getting both hands on it securely.

“Bag!” Sherlock called.

John swore, but came forward with the pillowcase held open. Sherlock carefully lowered the snake into the bag and quickly withdrew his arms as John tied it off. The rattling continued from within, but for now the threat had passed. Sherlock took the bag from him and placed it into the bathtub, closing the door firmly behind him as an added precaution. John was already refolding their clothes into the suitcase, the line of his shoulders tense. He barely glanced up when Sherlock knelt beside him to assist in the repacking.

A knot of worry twisted in his gut, and he snuck glances at the doctor, trying to figure out what had gone wrong in the past five minutes… besides the snake, of course.

He left John to finish their suitcases, slipping into the bathroom to retrieve their items from there and to make sure the snake was still secure. The creature has ceased it’s angry rattling now, but was moving a bit in the pillow case. He kept his distance all the same. Sherlock didn’t want to make it obvious that he was tiptoeing around John when he returned to the room, but that was what he was doing. Something had gone wrong, and until he figured out what he didn’t want to make anything worse.

John, who was apparently now the expert in all things Sherlock, eventually noticed this behaviour.

“Shut up,” John ordered.

“I didn’t say anything,” Sherlock protested.

“You were thinking, it’s annoying.”

Sherlock opened his mouth to retort, but stopped at the sight of John’s grin. “I do believe that’s _my_ line.”

“Yes, well it fit.”

John walked over to stretch up and peck him on the lips. “Stop worrying. It’s all fine, alright? Just, when I imagined how the rest of this evening was going to go, _there was no rattlesnake involved_.”

“Well glad I’ve figured out the extent of your adventurousness early on,” Sherlock quipped.

“Oi!” John objected, swatting him. “Most people _don’t_ like deadly snakes in bed with them.”

“Technically it was _under_ the bed.”

This earned Sherlock another quick kiss and a chuckle before John turned to remake the bed. Sherlock couldn’t determine if this reaction was more pleasing or just plain baffling. Lindner arrived shortly after with a man who he simply introduced as “the snake man.” Sherlock directed the latter to the bathroom.

“You caught it by yourself?” Lindner asked, disapproving.

“John helped,” Sherlock said defensively.

“Had you ever even caught a snake before?”

“No, but I knew about it in theory.”

“In _theory_ ‽” John piped up from across the room.

“I don’t know why you two are making a fuss over this. It _worked_ , didn’t it? Snake’s caught, no one was bitten, all is well! Now do please remove that thing, we need to hunt down a new hotel before it gets too late in the evening.”

Lindner departed with the snake, promising that they’d go over this more fully in the morning. It took another half hour to find and check into a new hotel, this one a good ten miles away from the previous one but still within good distance of the police. John fired off an email to Ms. Chambers, explaining their situation as well as their new location. Sherlock took his time putting their things in the new bathroom, pocketing the hand lotion in a fit of optimism.

John was stretched out on the bed, much as he had been the last time, only this time he was staring at the ceiling instead of Sherlock. Sherlock approached the foot of the bed and stopped, eyeing John sheepishly. This was all rather new for him, and he had absolutely no clue where they stood at the moment. John’s reassurance back at the other room had hardly gone very far. Was it acceptable to crawl right in and resume what they’d been after before, or was that moment gone? Did John even _want_ to try that all again?

“You’re thinking again,” John commented from the bed, drawing Sherlock’s attention back to him. “Well come on, don’t just stand there like a lost puppy. C’mere.”

John held open his arms for Sherlock to crawl into, leaning up to kiss him when he complied. Sherlock settled himself half on top of him, half on the side, and returned the kiss with enthusiasm. John’s hand slid down to his backside and he pulled Sherlock more firmly against him, nipping his lip before drawing back.

“Did you check under the bed?” John asked breathlessly.

“If there’s anything under this one it’s going to have to wait,” Sherlock huffed, ducking his head to reclaim his partner’s lips.

Any reasonable concern was well lost after that. Sherlock lost himself in the feel and taste of John’s mouth, trying desperately to store every last second of it in his mind palace. He didn’t want to lose any of this. Sure there would be other times, he certainly hoped so at least, but it would never be as new as this.

“You don’t stop thinking and get out of that head of yours I’m going to put _you_ under the bed,” John warned, laughing.

Sherlock responded by turning his attentions to John’s jaw and neck, hands running along his sides, over his chest, skimming down the outsides of his thighs. John arched into his touch, returning it with fluttering brushes of his own. He tugged Sherlock’s shirt out of the back of his trousers, replacing it with his hands in a firm grope. Sherlock let him lead his hips down into a slow grind, groaning into John’s neck. He sat up briefly, just long enough to rid them of their shirts, and then dove back into to pay his dues to John’s scars. It wasn’t long before he found himself suddenly rolled to the side and onto his back, John now leaning over him, his mouth working over his chest in return.

He lost himself to the sensations, the touch, mind narrowed singularly down to their points of connection. The remainder of their clothing had been discarded at some point, either by Sherlock or John or some combination of their efforts. And finally, Sherlock had a hand wrapped loosely around John’s length, thumb teasing the head with the slightest of pressure, and he was watching John gradually shake apart above him. He slowly maneuvered them upright, John straddling his thighs and attempting to smother his moans into Sherlock’s shoulder, perfectly content to ignore his own arousal in favour of watching John. John, who was gripping his shoulders and trembling fiercely as he reached the edge and tumbled over.

“Jesus, _Sherlock_ ,” John breathed raggedly.

Sherlock nudged  head out of his neck to snag him into a kiss, not caring that John was still a bit too winded to return it properly. Slowly, he traded his hold of John’s cock to his hip, drawing him in as closely as their current position would allow. Eventually, John began pulling back and slid his hand down Sherlock’s chest to wrap firmly around him. Sherlock bucked helplessly into the touch, staring down at John’s hand around him in awe.

This was _John_ that had hold of him right now, _John_ that was moving so _wonderfully_ over him. The mere notion of it was enough to have Sherlock fighting to hold on, to make it last just a bit longer. But then John had to twist his wrist ever so slightly and look up at him with this positively sinful expression, and Sherlock found himself pressing his face into John’s scarred shoulder as he came. John worked him through it, murmuring praises until he’d managed to slow his thundering heart. Sherlock pulled himself upright and all but launched himself at John, sending them tumbling backwards as he peppered his mouth and jaw with kisses and completely ignoring the sticky mess between them.

“Sherlock,” John laughed, nudging him away so he could maneuver them back towards the pillows and away from the damp spot they’d created.

Sherlock curled himself around the doctor, nuzzling into the man’s nape and forgiving how the damp hair tickled his nose. John chuckled, placing his hand over Sherlock’s where it rested on his stomach.

“What?” Sherlock rumbled. “Why are you laughing?”

“Nothing, nothing… you’re just…” John trailed off, shaking his head.

“I’m just what?” Sherlock asked, stilling.

“You’re just a lot more cuddly than I’d expected.”

“Problem?”

John rolled over in his arms, giving Sherlock a hard, firm kiss. “No, not a problem at all. Just unexpected… Though I guess I really shouldn’t have been surprised, you’ve always been a big cat.”

Sherlock nuzzled his way back into John’s neck. “We’re going to the store first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Shower first,” John said.

* * *

Immediately after breakfast, which was a sad affair in comparison to what they’d been treated to at the other place, Sherlock herded John into the Jeep and rushed them first to the rental place to exchange their car with an entirely different vehicle and then to the nearest store. John followed him in, equal parts amused and embarrassed. They were separated for a brief moment when John made the mistake of pausing to pick up a handbasket while Sherlock was darting off towards the only place in the store their target would make sense to be in. That was how Sherlock found himself standing alone, completely out of his depth, in front of a rather vast display of various… “bedroom” supplies.

“Why are there so many _options?”_ He hissed in annoyance.

This is why he left the shopping to John. Entirely too many different varieties of what was supposedly the same product all rallying in logo-space to declare themselves the best available, and none that immediately stuck out as what he needed.

There was another woman a little ways down from him, younger by at least a decade and looking over the pregnancy test arrangement with a mixed expression of anticipation and anxiety. Sherlock gave her a quick once-over. Owns a small, family bakery in the area, married for two… no, three years and hoping to find herself expecting her first child. Yes, she’d know all about this stuff.

Sherlock was turning to request her opinion when John appeared at his side, scolding him for having “run off” without him. Sherlock rolled his eyes and waved at the shelves in front of him instead of responding.

“Well?” He said expectantly.

“'Well' what?” John asked, already scanning the boxes.

“Well, what are we supposed to get! There are entirely too many boxes for one type of product!” Sherlock growled.

“Why don’t you go get us some milk, I’ll take care of this,” John promised.

Sherlock stared at him, completely thrown by this sudden change of subject. His brain was unreasonably slow to switch gears and start processing what John had just said. He wasn’t too sure with his conclusion, but he went with it anyway.

“John, you should know that I am rather open minded, and I will definitely try most things once… But at this point in time I’m going to have to put my foot down on you bringing milk into bed,” Sherlock announced firmly, eyeing his partner warily.

The lady down the aisle choked, hand covering her mouth, and John’s face turned a dark scarlet that Sherlock had never seen before on a living human’s face. The doctor stammered, mouth opening and closing on empty air.

“No… That’s… No! Not for- Oh Christ… It’s for _tea_ , you berk, not for _bed!_ You left the carton at the other hotel,” John groaned, hiding his face in his hands.

Sherlock’s eyes widened. “Oh. I’ll just go get that then. Wait, are these _flavoured?”_

“Sherlock, go!” John half shouted, giving him a shove.

“Get the strawberry, John! Or the orange… Actually just get one of everything. Is there a variety pack?”

“Sherlock!”

Sherlock headed off towards the dairy aisle, smirking to himself. While he may not be a stranger to sex, the “items” that went with it were rather new. A skip entered his step. This was one thing he couldn’t see himself growing bored of, and not because of these new discoveries, but because it was with _John._

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well. It has been over two years since I've last written anything like that, so I apologize for my rustiness. Hope it's enjoyable/not too horrible nonetheless. I don't quite remember how this chapter happened, it was a while ago that I wrote it (except for the actual sex part, I did that yesterday because I procrastinate something horrible). I think I'd started to write the sex, decided I shouldn't because I was using a school-issued computer, threw in a snake and then a cleverly placed line break for my betas to yell at me for. So here ya go. Murder, snakes, sex, and milk. What a day.  
> Anyhoo, I mentioned last chapter that I had become the proud mom of two rabbits. Well, those rabbits have since then become unbonded and extremely aggressive towards each other, so I have to give them back today and start looking into a new pair. So, I'm going to throw this chapter out hella early before I go deal with my day of stress and forget.


	8. Chapter 7

The skies were threatening hell during the drive back to the new hotel, darkened clouds rolling quickly across the blue to cast shade across the land below. The approach of what was sure to be a hellish storm put Sherlock on edge. Normal storms were fine, they had to be considering where he lived. This, the charge of electricity in the air and the distant rumble of thunder, was what made Sherlock’s hair stand on end. John, however, had cracked the window and was smiling.

It was a curious thing, John’s love of cloudy days and his deep hatred of the rare sunny day that would strike London. Sherlock couldn’t make a firm reasoning of it, though he suspected it had something to do with his time in Afghanistan. Perhaps, one of these days, Sherlock would gain the courage to ask him about it.

John’s hand found its way to rest on Sherlock’s thigh, not impeding him from driving or making any advances, just resting there. A flare of warmth spread through him nonetheless, and it was an effort to keep his eyes on the road. It was so new, this peculiar connection to another human being, equal amounts exciting and absolutely terrifying. Sherlock couldn’t recall having ever experienced these kinds of feelings before. He found himself wishing they could wrap this case up and be done as quickly as possible, just so he could explore this more. It was frustrating, having this overwhelming desire to discover this new connection and at the same time this the obligation to put an end to these killings. Considering this case had become personal and there was now a threat to John’s safety, Sherlock begrudgingly accepted that it would have to take priority.

_Later though,_ Sherlock amended, gaze drifting down the plastic shopping bag at John’s feet. _A few hours later, then the case takes priority._

A slow drizzle of fat drops had started up by the time they reached the new hotel, gradually increasing in quantity and frequency to let loose a full downpour by the time they reached the door. John was smiling as they waited for the elevator, a small, carefree smile that greatly improved Sherlock’s mood. Sherlock was suddenly struck with the desire to be in contact with him, just in some way, and he saw no real reason not to other than lack of certainty as to how John would respond. He hesitantly stretched his arm out until his hand brushed John’s empty one, then he carefully slid his fingers through John’s shorter digits. John froze, glancing down at their entwined hands. Sherlock waited, holding his breath and worried for a moment that he’d done something wrong, until the doctor relaxed and gave his hand a gentle squeeze in return

John was on him the moment the door closed behind them, pressing him back against the wall. Sherlock quickly took control, easing the kiss into something more soft and sweet. They’d had time for frantic last night, now he wanted time for slow.

“Slow,” Sherlock rumbled, trailing his mouth over John’s stubbled jaw. “I want to take my time with you. I want every _inch_ of you, every sound you make when I take you apart, and then I want to put you back together again so I can commit every little bit of you to my memory.”

John swallowed weakly, nodding and allowing Sherlock to nudge him backwards until they were falling onto the bed together. Sherlock crawled up over the doctor, careful to keep most of his weight off of him even as he lowered himself onto the other man. He started with John’s brow, brushing his lips over the line of them in a near kiss and working his way down over his cheek bones, nose, along his jawline and chin. He paused at the base of John’s neck to draw away long enough to remove John’s shirt, then went on to fully strip him instead. Sherlock spent ages going over every single inch of John’s skin, making sure none of it was left untasted or unexplored. When he’d finished with the front, he made him roll onto his stomach and started all over again. By the time he’d reached John’s very wonderfully curved arse, which he really couldn’t help but devote time into sucking a bruise into, John was rutting into the mattress and swearing at him.

“Sherlock, memorizing is very nice and all, but if you don’t _do_ something I swear to-“

He broke off in a high yelps as Sherlock nipped the mark he’d just made, and continued to mutter curses at him as he crawled his way up to drape himself across John’s back, hips pressed into the swell of John’s ass. Sherlock rolled his hips lightly and nipped at the back of his neck.

“Christ, why are you still dressed?” John huffed, pressing back into the grind.

Sherlock sat up, fingers moving quickly over the buttons of his shirt, only to be forced to move off completely when John decided he was still taking too long and need help. He struggled out of the remainder of his clothes and dove for the plastic shopping bag that was waiting on the nightstand. Lube and (unflavoured, how dull) condoms in hand, Sherlock turned back to fix John with a serious look.

“How do you want to do this?” Sherlock asked.

“However. I don’t care-“

“No, no. This is important, John. I need you to be specific. How do you want this?” Sherlock repeated.

“The way we were before,” John decided after a moment, already turning over to stretch out on his stomach and drag a pillow under his head. “You, in me. Definitely that.”

Sherlock hummed  in approval, getting the condom properly applied to himself before moving forward to kneel between John’s parted thighs. He poured some lubricant on his fingers, toke a moment to warm it some, and gently ran a slick finger over John’s crease.

“Have you done this before?” Sherlock hummed as he teased around his hole.

“Not… Not in a long time,” John breathed, trying to press back against his finger.

Sherlock nodded thoughtfully and carefully began working a single finger in. He took his time, not adding another finger until he could move without a hint of resistance and savouring every little breathless noise John made. He was careful not to give too much attention to his prostate, just enough to keep John thoroughly worked up but not nearly as much as John clearly wanted. Of course, John couldn’t simply beg for Sherlock to get on with it. He more or less just continued to swear at him to get a move on. Sherlock, amused, was all too happy to comply.

He made sure to thoroughly slick himself up before scooting forward and very carefully beginning to press himself in. At least, he’d meant to go carefully. John, apparently, had had enough waiting and took it upon himself to instead shove himself backwards onto Sherlock’s cock. They both swore, Sherlock dropping forward to press his temple into the back of John’s neck as he fought to keep himself still, John gasping into the sheets and gripping the pillow beneath tightly. Gradually, they managed to steady themselves.

“Alright,” John breathed, shoulders beginning to relax. “Alright, I’m good. You can move.”

Sherlock started to move his hips in a slow, shallow grind, watching the line of John’s shoulders for any sudden tensing, any little indication that he was in pain. Not finding any. he lowered himself to completely cover John’s back, sliding one arm under his chest and using the other to brace himself, all the while keeping up the deep, grinding roll he’d set.

Sherlock picked up the pace, drawing out more and more with each thrust until he had to push himself up in order to keep it up. John let out a shout at the first brush of his sweet spot, and Sherlock quickly adjusted his angle to continue that pressure, reveling in the now broken moans and cries coming from the man below him. Sherlock hooked his arm under John’s hip, pulling him up enough to slide his hand around to grip John’s cock. John bucked and immediately bit his pillow in a desperate attempt to muffle himself. He was trembling, hips making little aborted thrusts both back into Sherlock and forward into his fist as if he couldn’t decide which he’d rather have. Sherlock drove in harder, quickly adjusting the angle of his thrusts.

John keened as he came, jerking in Sherlock’s grip and tightening beautifully around his cock. Sherlock pressed himself in as deep as he could, taking advantage of the fluttering of John’s core to milk out his own end. He draped himself over John’s back again, rolling his hips in shallow circles as they both trembled through the aftermath. John turned his head, seeking Sherlock’s mouth in an awkwardly angled kiss. Sherlock stilled, hips flushed with John’s arse, struggling to catch breath through his nose while keeping his mouth moving with John’s. After a long moment, he reluctantly drew away and carefully slid out, murmuring a soft apology at John’s hiss of discomfort. With some manhandling, he got John out of the wet spot and onto his back and sprawl halfway across him.

“We should probably wash up,” John muttered halfheartedly.

Sherlock hummed noncommittally, burying his face in the still damp crook of John’s neck. He rather liked how John smelled here, and his curiosity piqued a bit. John tensed, then shook his head.

“Did you just _lick_ me?” He asked in a breathless giggle.

“Data, John,” Sherlock mumbled, not bothering to lift his head at all.

John laughed again, more fond than teasing, and turned his head to peck the side of Sherlock’s temple. Sherlock decided that was definitely not enough, and retreated from his shelter to fully capture John’s lips. After a moment, John broke away with a rueful smile.

“I don’t know how quick your recovery period is, but I’m not as young as I used to be,” John wheezed.

Sherlock snorted, burying his face back in John’s neck. “Not that old.”

“Old enough.”

Sherlock hummed his dissent, slowly submitting to the fact that there _was_ still a case to be solved and Lindner wasn’t likely to manage it on his lonesome. For now though, there was nothing really to do but wait for Lindner to get back to them with the files from Lara’s computer. Sherlock expected those results would be along shortly enough.

John stroked a hand down Sherlock’s back, redrawing his attention. “We _do_ need to clean up a bit if we don’t want to end up stuck together,” He pointed out.

“You say that like it’s undesirable.”

“Bad for work.”

“ _Fine,”_ Sherlock sighed dramatically, rolling away. “Start the water?”

“Why do I have to do it?”

“You’re closer and getting clean was _your_ idea.”

“You just don’t want to get up, you lazy twit,” John grumbled good naturedly as he practically fell out of bed and stumbled off to start the shower.

Sherlock waited a few minutes after he heard the water start up before forcing himself up. John was already under the spray when he entered, but the curtain was only half drawn as if in invitation. The doctor smiled up at him as Sherlock stepped in behind him, water dripping from his greying bangs onto his face. Sherlock returned the smile easily, reaching passed him to retrieve their small bottle of travel shampoo. This, he noted as he squeezed out a dollop into his palm, was new. Never, in all of his years, had he showered with another person. Like everything else that involved John, Sherlock found he couldn’t be arsed to care.

John tilted his chin down a bit, closing his eyes and letting out a soft sigh as Sherlock worked the shampoo through his short hair in a thick lather. Once satisfied, he nudged John back into the spray and began rinsing out the soap. He retrieved his own bottle of body wash, giving the thin hotel-provided bar of plastic a disdainful glance, and set about soaping over John’s shoulders. John watched him work in silence, water still dripping from his lashes, and a small smile curved his lips when Sherlock’s fingers gentled around his scar.

The whole thing was almost unbearably intimate, more so than anything Sherlock had ever done in his life. It never strayed into the realm of sexual, even when Sherlock moved to John’s backside, but there was a certain amount of _closeness_ that couldn’t be ignored either. He’d never admit it, but it frightened him a bit. Sherlock had grown accustomed to the emotions already - though he still couldn’t accurately name them - yet the sheer _strength_ of it all was off-balancing.

Second rinse complete, it was now John who picked up the shampoo bottle and overturned it into his palm. Sherlock bent at the knees, lowering himself to be at a more reachable height, and gave what he hoped was a sweet smile in return to John’s glare. John’s soapy fingers ran through his hair, scratching gently as he went and muttering something about human giraffes. Sherlock relaxed into his touch with a quiet hum, allowing himself to be turned this way and that at John’s bidding. Unfamiliar sensations aside, Sherlock was slightly surprised to find just how much he actually enjoyed this sort of contact.

Rearranging themselves so that Sherlock could get under the showerhead was a novel experience. Hotel showers _really_ were not designed to accommodate two grown men. Two near fatal slips later had Sherlock under the spray, feeling very much like a drowning cat, and John making a sound that could only be described as a giggle. Sherlock stored the sound away, making a mental note to go back and edit the pattering rush of the shower out later.

Sherlock’s phone chimed from the main room, calling them back to the real world. They dried themselves separately, and Sherlock forwent clothes in favour of getting to his phone quickly. A text from Lindner was waiting for him, and it was everything Sherlock could do not to throw the device after he finished reading it.

“Good news?” John asked, walking out with one hand still towelling his hair.

“No,” Sherlock spat. “Lindner wants us to come in, go over what very _little_ they managed to recover from Lara’s hard drive.”

“Well, we weren’t really expecting much to have come out of that in the first place, were we?” John pointed out, already pulling out clothes from their suitcase. “Let’s just see where this gets us.”

“Unless it can somehow magically tell us where to find this _Eliza_ woman, we’re not going to get anywhere,” Sherlock grumbled.

John nodded absently, tossing a rolled pair of socks at Sherlock as he passed on his way to his shoes. Sherlock paused for a moment, watching his partner. He seemed resigned in a way, disappointed maybe.

“John,” Sherlock began, unsure where he was going with this.

The doctor looked up expectantly. Damn that man and his stupidly adorable face.

“John, you should know that I… well, relationships and all this,” Sherlock began, waving a hand vaguely between them, “I don’t exactly qualify as an expert with all this, and…”

John raised a hand, cutting him off. “I know. I know, and I don’t expect or want you to be anything other than yourself. I don’t expect you to suddenly stop being an annoying git just because we’re shagging, and I definitely don’t expect you to drop cases or anything either. It’s all fine. Now, we can sit here and discuss our _emotions_ further-”

“Oh please _don’t-”_

“ _-or_ , we can go meet with Lindner,” John added, smiling.

Sherlock nodded fervently. “Yes, that. Let’s do that.”

“Good. Now get your scarf, it’s supposed to be cold today.”

John dropped a quick kiss on Sherlock’s cheek as he passed, unknowingly shutting down the genius’s brain for several seconds. Sherlock collected up his scarf and gloves, unable to prevent a small smile from settling on his lips.

* * *

Lindner was waiting for them in his office, looking far more rested than he had been the last time they’d seen him. The detective greeted them warmly, if a bit unenthusiastically, and immediately launched into the results from Lara’s documents.

“Whatever important or potentially useful papers Mr. Lara might have kept, they must’ve been strictly on paper because this has gotten us nowhere,” Lindner announced. “On paper, Ms. Eliza Deyr currently resides in a penitentiary outside Lawrence, Kansas. I have one of my people contacting them now, see if she’s still there… or ever _was_ there, I should say.  She did all of her business from a coffee shop down the way, on their wifi, and with a disposable cell from Wal-Mart. We have the phone in evidence now, she’d left it in the trash can there.”

“Do you have the security footage from the café?” Sherlock interjected.

“We do. I have people analysing it now, but it’s shit quality so it won’t get us very far.”

Sherlock nodded absently. “So, in short, we have practically nothing to lead us to this woman.”

“Currently, no. No we do not.”

John piped up then, more musing aloud than actually trying to come up with a plan. “If she was the contact for Lara, who’s to say she wasn’t for the others too? One of them might still have documents laying about somewhere. Bryan Glass had an office off of his sitting room. I remember seeing it on the way in. And there was at least two feet in the basement that the lab didn’t cover, but I’d put money on that just being a gun locker.”

Both detectives had stopped, staring at the blonde in open surprise. John took a moment to notice, and his pondering expression changed to one of complete bewilderment. If Lindner hadn’t been in the room, Sherlock probably would have kissed him senseless.

“John, once again you’ve proven that you are positively _brilliant_ ,” Sherlock crowed. “We need to get to Glass’s house before any more documents can be destroyed… if they haven’t been already.”

John flushed at the praise, ducking his chin to hide his smile. Lindner grinned and jumped to his feet, gathering up the files and reaching for his phone. They drove separately to Bryan Glass’s house, Sherlock practically bouncing off the sides of the car in his excitement at the prospect of a new lead, and John was still in high spirits.

“I’ll search the office, you check the basement again, yeah?” John offered as they swung into the driveway.

Sherlock hummed in agreement, already halfway to the front door and only pausing briefly while Lindner unlocked the door. He swept in, quickly pulling up a mental blueprint of the house and confirming that John’s theory about the basement’s floor plan missing a few feet, and felt a swell of pride for his blogger. How Sherlock had missed it was beyond him, and he chastised himself for it a bit, but he couldn’t help enjoy John managing to surprise him yet again.

Leaving John and Lindner to sort through the mess that was Bryan Glass’s office, Sherlock descended into the basement and began running his fingers over every bit of wall available. He alternated between tapping on the drywall and feeling along the edges of picture frames or corners. It didn’t take too long to find the safe, hidden behind a large “Who’s On First?” poster, and even less time to guess the combination (four digit pin, the one key most worn, followed by the nine, and a slight scratch visible on the seven. One-nine-nine-seven then. Undoubtedly Jaydon’s birth year.)

More points to John Watson, the true genius: it was primarily a small gun locker. Hunting rifles mostly, few handguns, one of questionable legality, and a box of ammunition. Beside this was another box, this one of old, well cared for wood. It was this that Sherlock withdrew from the safe. There was a small brass padlock on it, and Sherlock took time to pick it with care, not wanting to damage it. Everything about this box screamed sentiment and importance. There was a small inscription carved into the underside, a name and a year. Family heirloom then. John’s voice cropped up in his mind then, not even an articulate sound and more just a reminder of his presence. It was enough for Sherlock to decide he should return the box to Nicole or her son after he was done with it.

Sherlock eased open the box, mindful of the ancient hinges, and began sorting through the various papers within. It appeared mostly to be personal documents (social security card, copy of birth certificate, medical records from when Jaydon was young, and a few old photographs) but there was a fresh, barely worn note card tucked against the side.

          _Eliza Deyr (314) 971 - 30 &#_

_Contact for Ratica_

_½ lb shipments, every 2 weeks_

Sherlock glared at the phone number, cursing it for being smudged.

“Ratica,” He tried aloud, testing it.

Well, at least they had a name now.

Sherlock carefully packed everything back into the box and hurried back up the stairs. John and Lindner were still sorting through files, but they looked up when he entered.

“What’s that?” John asked, nodding to the box under Sherlock’s arm.

“Family heirloom. You were right about the gun locker,” Sherlock added with a sly grin. “We should move on to the next victim’s house, you won’t find anything else here.”

“Did you find something useful then?” Lindner sighed, tossing the folder down.

“Only this,” He replied, producing the note card. “The phone number is practically useless, but the name might get us somewhere at least. Recognize it?”

Lindner took the card, frowning at it. His eyebrows shot up a moment later.

“Yeah, I do. Ratica is a big time drug lord, but no matter how hard we try we can’t get anything to stick on him. Actually, we can’t even get him in person either. A faceless name if you will. He’s good… very good, and if he’s involved in this…” Lindner stopped, puffing out a breath. “We might be in trouble.”

“Oh please,” Sherlock scoffed. “He may be good, but I’ve dealt with better. Leaving a trail like this? Amateur. We need to find Eliza Deyr. We find her, we’ll find him. Now, which house are we off to next? Doesn’t hurt to check if they’ve left any records while we’re at it.”

“Alison O’Hara’s place is a block down, we can swing by,” Lindner decided. “You’re keeping the box?”

“It’s an heirloom, very well kept despite being over ninety years old and obviously important. Ms. Chambers or her son will want it back,” Sherlock said calmly, ignoring the way John’s head swiveled around to stare at him.

Lindner nodded in acceptance and headed out of the office to begin locking up.

“That’s very… considerate of you,” John noted, voice both praising and confused.

“Try not to sound too surprised,” Sherlock grumbled.

John just smiled at him, following him out into the yard where they had to wait for Lindner to join them. At the bottom of the driveway, idling in front of the mailbox, was a white postal truck. Its driver looked up at them, offered a wave, and then drove on to the next house. Beside him, John let out of small sound of consideration.

“What?” Sherlock asked, glancing down at him.

“Nothing, nothing…”

Sherlock stared at him.

“It’s just… Why would he still be delivering Bryan’s mail? I can’t say I’m an expert on their postal system, but he’s been legally dead for how long now? Three weeks?” John mused. “You’d think they’d have redirect his stuff by now or something.”

Sherlock paused, considering. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? There was something familiar about that driver, did you notice?”

John frowned after the truck, now several houses down, and his eyes suddenly widened in realization.

“Sherlock, I think that’s the man that hit you.”

“Almost hit me-”

“Close enough. Our old hotel wasn’t anywhere near here, it couldn’t have been part of his route, could it?” John asked, frowning even more now.

Lindner had joined them then, and raised an eyebrow expectantly once he caught sight of their expressions. Sherlock paused for a moment longer, still watching the truck, then nodded firmly.

“We need to bring him in,” Sherlock announced.

“Bring who in?” Lindner asked.

“That mailman.”

“ _Why_ do I need to arrest a mailman?”

“He’s the one that hit Sherlock back at the hotel,” John explained. “That was miles from here and… Sherlock, he brought you up to the room. He knew which room we were staying in.”

“The snake,” Sherlock murmured in realization. “Lindner, you need to bring him in.”

“I can’t just go arrest him-”

“Well figure out some way to bring him in. Give me O’Hara’s address, we’ll check the rest of the houses,” Sherlock reported.

“Fine. Alright, here,” Lindner sighed, pulling out a pocket journal and jotting down the address. He handed over both the page and the respective keys.

“There’s a judge downtown that owes me a favour, I’ll go secure a warrant. Seven promised he’d have a full tox’ report for all of the victims by one,  so I need to drop by there before I bring in the mail,” Lindner said, sharing a quick grin with John at his joke.

Sherlock felt his eye twitch. “Keep us updated.”

He moved on to start the car, waiting for John to get in and buckle before swinging out of the driveway. Sherlock handed his phone and the addresses to John. If it wasn’t for the fact that Sherlock found the way his blogger used technology to be strangely endearing, he’d sit down and teach the man how to properly type on a phone of keyboard. As it was, he was content to wait the extra minute while John tapped the address into his GPS.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My apologies for the delay. Here you are, chapter seven. Tad bit more sexy times and some actual plot for this chapter, significantly less random snakes though.


	9. Chapter 8

There were very few things that were capable of frustrating Sherlock Holmes _more_ than hitting a rock solid, bone-dry, dead end in a case. Those few things usually, but not always, involved a certain Mycroft Holmes in one way or another, and if it didn’t it was some mishap or miscommunication that ended with John angry, hurt, or generally unhappy - which generally made Sherlock unhappy as well.

It was on this occasion, in their second hotel room of what was proving to be a rather long “holiday,” that two of these “things” decided to gang up on Sherlock. The first being the obvious brick wall in the case, and the second being a spiff between him and John when Sherlock accidentally allowed his irritation in the case to bleed into what had previously been a quiet night in front of the telly in bed with his partner. Sherlock had replied a bit snappily, John responded coolly, and Sherlock snapped again. John was less forgiving the second time.

All of this ended with John storming into the bathroom to “have a soak” and leaving Sherlock to stew in his own frustration and self loathing. That, whether fortunately or not can’t quite be said, didn’t last very long. Anger gave way to a nibble of worry in the back of his mind, which quickly bloomed into a full fledged anxiety.

Sherlock found himself standing outside the resolutely closed bathroom door, shifting from foot to foot in uncertainty. The argument had been mild, very much so compared to others they’d had in the past, but with the new dynamic to their relationship, Sherlock suddenly found himself very unsteady with how this might have affected things between them. He was also uncertain how he was supposed to behave in this situation. Was he to enter the bathroom and make amends or wait it out? If he did, was he supposed to knock and wait first for permission to enter? This was all entirely too new and entirely too unknown for him to make heads or tails of it. He wanted back the calm, easy intimacy they’d shared this morning, and he hadn’t a clue as to how to obtain it.

“I know you’re hovering out there,” John called through the door, sounding tired, “just come in, will you?”

Sherlock froze, ashamed at having been found out, but promptly shook himself out of it and stepped into the steam filled room. John looked up from him from where he was reclined in the tub - this one much less impressive than their previous hotel’s tub - and offered a small, only half-hearted smile. Sherlock came to kneel beside the tub, ignoring how he knees became soaked from a puddle on the floor and trying to keep his gaze upwards for the sake of seriousness. John probably wouldn’t appreciate him becoming distracted at this time.

“Well?” John said flatly.

“I… This is where I’m supposed to apologize, yes?” Sherlock asked hopefully.

“Don’t apologize if you just _think_ you’re supposed to. If you don’t mean it, I don’t want to hear it,” John sighed, sinking back further into the water.

“I-I _do_ mean it, I just… Is this the appropriate time to do it?”

John only raised an eyebrow at him.

Sherlock let out a frustrated growl and dropped his forehead onto the cool plastic of the tub. A wet hand dropped onto the back of his head, fingers rubbing slightly. John let out a long sigh, his hand moving to nudge Sherlock’s head up to look at him.

“I told you before that I don’t expect you to change your behaviour just because we’re sleeping together, Sherlock,” John assured. “I know this is how you get when cases go sour, always has been. You’re still an arsehole and I still have a temper. I’m not about to walk out for good over a little spat like this.”

Sherlock gently entwined their hands, idly studying the way the water rolled off his skin and considering his words with care.

“I’m not… good, with this,” Sherlock began, if a bit raggedly. “This… well, you know-”

“It’s painful just listening to this. C’mon, get in, you,” John ordered with a crooked smile.

Sherlock grinned and released John’s hand in favour of removing his clothing. John leaned forward, giving Sherlock room to slip in behind him. The tub was a bit on the small side for two grown men, and Sherlock couldn’t help but wish they were back in Baker Street where the tub definitely _could_ hold them both more comfortably. For now, though, this was enough.

John twisted around to face him, carefully settling himself between Sherlock’s thighs, somehow managing to keep from elbowing or kneeing him in the cramped space. Sherlock instinctively settled his arms around him and shifted down a bit so they were more horizontal.

“This is a bit ridiculous,” Sherlock chuckled, making absolutely no attempt to move.

“A bit. Want to move?” John offered.

“No. Not yet… though this _is_ rather uncomfortable.”

“Let’s see if I can’t do anything to help that, hm?” John murmured.

John turned around to gently connect his lips with Sherlock’s, bestowing a few slow, closed mouth kisses before shifting his weight in order to deepen it. With a contented hum, Sherlock parted his lips to allow him in. He was completely at John’s mercy, boneless and pliant and warm, and for once he didn’t mind that at all. John’s hips nudged forward more firmly against his, both of them already half-hard and short of breath. With a soft groan, Sherlock slid his hands down John’s backside to draw him even closer against him and rocked his hips up to meet him. They spent a moment rolling against each other, ignoring how the water came dangerously close to sloshing over the side of the tub, or how it had gotten a bit too chilled for true comfort.

John drew back a bit, lips still brushing Sherlock’s and their foreheads rested against one another. “Ready to move now?” He asked breathlessly.

“More than ready,” Sherlock rumbled in response, already nudging John away so that he could sit up.

They spared only a moment for a brief towel off before moving into the room. John went immediately to the bed, but Sherlock stood back for a moment.

“John,” He called.

The doctor hummed in acknowledgement, already stripping off the duvet and pulling back the sheets.

“There’s only one bed.”

“Yes,” John said slowly, now looking up with a touch of confusion.

Sherlock simply raised an eyebrow, waiting. John’s face slowly broke into a mischievous grin and he moved to stand in front of him.

“Yes,” He repeated, still slow but now deliberate. “But have you seen the bathroom?”

Sherlock leaned in to brush his nose along John’s, dropping his voice into a deep rumble. “In fact I have. It wasn’t nearly as nice as I would’ve liked… though the nude army doctor they’ve seem to have thrown in might make up for it.”

John laughed, shaking his head fondly. “Get on the bed, you.”

* * *

Sherlock returned to the bed, wordlessly handing John a damp cloth and settling back onto his pillow. He was in desperate need of a shower, but couldn’t find it in him to actually get up and go do it. The frustration of the case still lingered on in the back of his mind, festering into something ugly, but for now he could ignore it. For now, he was content to simply lay beside his partner, listening to him try to regulate his breathing as Sherlock did the same, and bask in the afterglow.

John rolled onto his side, propping his head up on his arm to stare down at him.

“Don’t you go getting into that head of yours that you can go be an arsehole all you want and get away with it by pulling me into amazing make-up sex,” John scolded sternly, though his eyes were practically glittering with mirth.

“Amazing, was it?” Sherlock purred.

“Hush, you.”

Sherlock raised an eyebrow, opening his mouth to make a snarky reply only to be cut off rather forcefully by John’s lips. He decided that this was a perfectly acceptable alternative to talking and quickly nudged John onto his back so that he could take control of it. John pulled back slightly, already breathless.

“I’m not _that_ young anymore, Sherlock,” He laughed weakly.

“I’m hardly pressing for more, Mr. Insatiable,”  Sherlock shot back, smirking.

“I believe the title _doctor_ is a bit more appropriate.”

Sherlock snorted, nuzzling his face into John’s throat and settling himself half-on, half-off of the smaller man. John looped his arms around him, one hand stroking over Sherlock’s back. Sherlock had never imagined himself as a cuddler, never imagined himself to be capable of slowing down enough to actually do this sort of physical contact, and yet here he was, greatly enjoying the pressure of John’s arms around him and the feel of their bare skin against each other. He knew he’d begin to feel a bit too claustrophobic or warm in a few moments though.

It had been a largely unproductive day, with Lindner still working on bringing the suspicious postal worker into custody and one of his tech-officers reviewing what little they _did_ have on Eliza Deyr. All there was to do now was to wait for things to fall into place. Sherlock loathed this, the waiting. There wasn’t a criminal to chase down yet, there wasn’t a lead to look into or a suspect to investigate. Although, Sherlock decided that today’s activities was a serviceable way of passing the time, one to be implemented frequently in the future.

“Where do we go from here?” John asked suddenly. “When we bring in the mailman, what do we do next?”

Sherlock was familiar with this tactic, and he knew John asked this more for Sherlock’s benefit than his own, though he’d never called him on it. It could, at times, prove helpful to recite everything out loud.

“We find out what he knows, if anything, about Eliza or Ratica. From there, we track down one of the two, both if possible. I doubt we’ll get close to Ratica on the first go. We’ll find Eliza, and we’ll get Ratica through her. I’ll stay long enough to make sure all charges stick, then we’re back to London and on to the next,” Sherlock said, then paused. “Though I do believe a bit of a holiday is in order. A real one, that is.”

John laughed, shaking his head a bit. “Even if we did try to go on a normal holiday, some disaster or murder would come find us… Besides, you’d be bored silly within a week.”

“Probably,” Sherlock admitted.

“I miss Baker Street too much to rush off on another ‘work holiday’ anyways. Our vacation can be as long as it takes for you to get a new case once we get back,” John decided.

Sherlock considered this, then nodded in acceptance. “That’s suitable. Though… John, the walls at Baker Street are rather thin.”

John stilled.

“Guess you’re moving into my bedroom then. That answers that question,” John announced.

“Oh good. I was hoping to convert the open room into a new lab, and mine is much closer to the kitchen. How convenient,” Sherlock chirped, already drawing up a mental blueprint of how he was going to redesign the space.

John let out a strained sigh. “Please, put in some safety precautions then.”

Sherlock paused, then hesitantly went back and added in a few safety procedures into his blueprints. It was unlikely that he’d ever _need_ them, per se, but if it made John feel better and gave him permission to build a lab… Well, he could sacrifice a few square feet.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short chapter, I know. This was one of those banging-head-on-brick-wall kinda chapters to write so. Oh well. Just as a little heads up, chapter 10 will probably be a little late. I'll try to get it up on that Sunday, but I might have to throw it up Saturday night or sometime Monday.


	10. Chapter 9

Lindner emailed in the early hours of the morning with the mugshots of the two postmen that shared the route through Bryan’s neighborhood. Funnily enough, for John at least, both drivers also had a route that included the houses of all of the victims. John identified the man who nearly hit Sherlock, but Sherlock insisted that both be called in for questioning. That, as it happened, proved to be somewhat problematic as it was a Sunday, and the postal service doesn’t run on Sundays.

“It’s going to take some time to track them down,” Lindner had said over the phone. “I have to hunt down their manager so I can have _him_ hunt down their addresses so that we can hunt _them_ down. All in all, it’s going to be a royal pain in the ass.”

“Fine. Just keep me updated, and do hurry. The longer it takes us to track down leads, the more time Ratica has to get away. He’ll know the gig’s up by now, and most likely he’s already finished cleaning up shop. We need to get to Deyr before they can leave the country,” Sherlock snapped back.

Sherlock absolutely hated waiting for things. Not to say that he was an instant gratification sort of person, no he could be plenty patient when it came to his more delicate experiments. He also found that he had a rather large breadth of patience for most everything John related. Sitting around waiting for someone _else_ to make progress on a case when he could probably do it all much more efficiently himself, was something he definitely did _not_ have patience for.

Unfortunately, there was nothing for it. Lindner had pressed the need to get all of this cleared and done with legally, and Sherlock begrudgingly agreed with him. Having a criminal walk free because they’d nipped red tape or skipped over a step of some tedious but important legal procedure was easily one of the most infuriating experiences Sherlock had encountered. So, if sitting around waiting for Lindner to jump through all the proper hoops in order to bring in their suspects meant that whatever they managed to get would actually _stick_ and _stay stuck_ by the time they went to court, then so be it. Sherlock would wait. That’s not to say that he hadn’t found a perfectly acceptable way to pass the time thanks to the new developments of his social life. Though it should be noted, as he was greatly disappointed to discover, and much to John’s evident amusement, that there was in fact a limit to the frequency men their age could engage in this activity.

It should also be noted that John was definitely, without doubt, and with great need to be publicly recognized, actually a true genius. This, as Sherlock had firmly decided, was absolute fact. Hell, he would say it was a law unto the Universe itself. John Hamish Watson was a genius.

While Sherlock may never really _say_ this to the man aloud, or at least never do so with any form of frequency, it was a firm constant in his mind.

John, in their seemingly endless down time, took it upon himself to introduce Sherlock to intimacy. Sharing a bed with another person wasn’t exactly new, but sharing a bed with his current partner while _not_ being engaged in a more physical activity _was_ rather new. Now, for example, they were sitting against the headboard, sides flush with each other, with John idly watching some movie and Sherlock tapping away at his laptop. It was nothing too different from how they often found themselves at home, except for John’s hand resting on Sherlock’s thigh, a steady pressure that wasn’t demanding anything more than his company. Now and then Sherlock would distract himself with tracing the veins and bones on the back of John’s hand.

With sudden clarity, Sherlock could picture himself with greyed hair and wrinkled skin, John beside him and handsome in his old age, them carrying on much as they are now. He’d never really considered retirement, never expected to live that long or had any real desire to. Now, however, he did consider it, and found it all incredibly satisfying. So long as he could keep John at his side, retirement no longer seemed too terrible of a prospect, too far off a reality.  

* * *

Lindner managed to bring in both of the postmen by four in the afternoon. It took Sherlock and John a further hour to make it to the station (thank you rush-hour traffic) and they immediately launched into interrogation. Lindner refused to let him speak to them in person, at least not until he’d run into a dead end with them, and instead allowed Sherlock to provide some guideline questions. The detective had been in this business a while, and Sherlock felt confident that he could handle the interrogation easily enough on his own. If not, Sherlock was waiting on the other side of the mirrored glass, ready to take over at any sign of trouble.

John had stepped out to hunt down coffee halfway through the first interrogation, which was so far going along smoothly. The man was clearly an idiot, and there was no possibility at all of him having been involved in any of this. He was, however, the same man that had hit Sherlock in the parking lot the other day. Whether that was purely coincidence or not was for Lindner to hash out. The topic had yet to be brought up, but Lindner had proven to be fairly competent thus far so Sherlock was willing to allow him a bit more time before intervening. Surely enough, Lindner raised the question not a moment later, just as John had returned to the room.

“So,” Lindner started, absently flipping through his papers, “you had a bit of a bump with a civilian the other day, yeah?”

The man visibly tensed. “How… did he report it? His friend said he’d take care of it, that everything was okay. Is the guy alright?”

“Oh, he’s fine. But you walked him back up to his room, correct?” Lindner continued.

“Well, yeah. Didn’t think he could make it on his own.”

“You saw what room he was staying in?”

“I… I guess? His friend met us in the hall and took him from there. Look, what’s this about? You just told me the guy’s alright, and this has nothing to do with my post route-”

“I ask because someone made an attempt on his, and his friend’s, life not long after your little… bump into one another,” Lindner countered calmly, watching his suspect with great care despite his nonchalant posture.

“A-And you think _I_ did that?!” He cried, going pale.

“We’re not ruling it out just yet.”

“No! God, no! I would never! I couldn’t- I mean-”

Sherlock turned away from the window as Lindner started to soothe the panicking man, taking John’s coffee for a sip.

“I did get you your own cup, you know,” He grumped softly.

“Yes, but yours tastes better.”

“They are literally exactly the same.”

“Hush.”

John sighed, long suffering yet somehow remaining fond, and he surrendered his coffee in favour of the other identical one. Lindner stepped into the darkened room, the first suspect having been sufficiently calmed and lead away now, and gratefully accepted the cup that John offered him.

“So, something tells me that wasn’t our guy,” Lindner said, frowning slightly. “Unless he was the best actor I’ve ever seen, but I highly doubt it.”

Sherlock nodded slowly, eyeing John’s coffee consideringly. “No, definitely not. How long until we can start on the other one?”

John moved just slightly out of reach.

“I figured we could break for dinner, it’s already past six o’clock,” Lindner replied with a glance at his watch.

“If he _is_ our man, letting him sit gives him more time to come up with excuses. I’d rather not wait.”

Lindner made a small sound of agreement around his coffee as he drained the last of it and tossed the empty cup in the bin.

“Right. I’ll have someone call in sandwiches to be delivered for afterwards. Any ideas for this one?” Lindner asked on his way to the door.

“No, no. You’re doing well enough on your own for now. If I catch something I’ll send a text,” Sherlock added offhandedly, waving him away.

John was staring at him in parts bemusement and a tad confusion after Lindner had left the room.

“What?”

“You’re a lot more appraising of Lindner than you have ever been of Lestrade,” John noted.

“And?”

“And,” John prompted.

Sherlock shot him a look and shrugged. “They’re both actually competent at their profession, tolerable to work with at the very least. Lestrade and I… that sort of bickerment is just part of our… friendship? If you can call it that.”

“He’s your friend and you know it,” John admonished with a slight smile. “How do you explain your brother then?”

“Ugh, Mycroft has always been insufferable. That is a completely different circumstance. Though, I will admit he has been much better since he started dating _Lestrudel_ ,” Sherlock huffed, nose crinkling in distaste.

“Wait. Mycroft and Greg are dating?”

“Well, if you want to call it ‘dating.’ How haven’t you noticed? The tension between them whenever they’re in the same room is nauseating.”

“I just thought they didn’t care for each other,” John muttered, seemingly stunned. “I am going to give him so much crap when we get back. Can’t believe he never said anything.”

Sherlock shrugged, turning back to the window and leaving John to fume over his drinking-buddy’s betrayal. Lindner was just getting the next suspect settled in, ignoring the man’s rather distasteful attempts to get a reaction of sort from him. The man, Elijah Singleton, was very much… less put-together than the previous man had been. His clothes - a pair of ratty, stained jeans and a worn wifebeater covered by a jacket that looked like it hadn’t been washed since the seventies - were ill-fitting, too loose at the hips and too tight over the man’s beer belly. What little hair he did have left was swept back in the most awful comb-over Sherlock had ever had the displeasure of seeing and was so oily that Sherlock couldn’t tell if the man was a blonde or a burnet, and it looked like the man had a grand total of three yellowed teeth in his entire head. His eyes were yellowed and bloodshot, and there was distinct nicotine stains on his fingers and nails. All together he was… rather disgusting.

With a personality to match, it appeared.

“Well,” John murmured, ducking his chin, “he didn’t come from a very deep gene pool, did he?”

Sherlock snorted.

“You get anything from him yet?” John asked.

“Define ‘anything,’” Sherlock hummed, simply for the pleasure of poking the bear.

John huffed, crossing his arms and simply waiting.

“Yes, fine. You’re not wrong about that gene pool. He’s low middle class, living at home most likely. Might not be with his parents, but he definitely doesn’t own the place. Been working as a postman for a while, also part time as a mechanic by the state of his hands… He’s an addict, could be unrelated though I doubt it. And I would put money on him being a bit of a bigot. He’s mentioned Christ at least three times since entering the room,” Sherlock added in distaste.

John nodded, studying the man on the other side of the one-way glass. “What a pleasant individual.”

Sherlock made a small sound of agreement, leaning in a bit. “He was raised in a rural area.”

“Experience with snakes, then?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“Is there any real point in actually interrogating him at this point? You’ve pretty much gotten everything you need.”

“Oh, there’s always more he could tell us. Just not about himself. I want to know who his contact is, and just how involved he’s been.”

John nodded again, more slowly this time. “But you think he’s involved, yeah?”

Sherlock raised an eyebrow at him.

“Right, right. Don’t jump to conclusions without all the facts. But do you?”

“Undoubtedly. However, I find it unlikely that he knows what he’s truly involved in.”

Lindner was starting now, having finished running through all the introductory protocol while Sherlock was distracted. Singleton sat back in his chair in an arrogant sprawl, legs spread intentionally to an indecent width, and he was giving Lindner a wide, ugly smirk with all three of his teeth.

“Be gentle, Officer,” Singleton sneered. “It’s my first time.”

Lindner barely batted an eye. “Your file says otherwise. But you’re not here for that right now, son.”

“Oh, yeah? What’m’I in for today then?”

Lindner ignored him, flipping through his folder with a marked lack of interest. He paused on a sheet of paper for a long moment before looking across the table at Singleton.

“So. You’ve been a postal drive for ten months now, and you’ve gotten four reprimands since you started. Tell me, how does a street man such as yourself go from jabbing needles in back allies to delivering mail?” Lindner asked conversationally.

Singleton shrugged. “Needed cash, had a friend who could get me hired.”

“Your friend must be pretty clean cut for just his word to get them to look passed your record, yeah?”

“Yeah, I guess. She’s a real fine gal,” Singleton said, smirking.

“I bet. What’s her name again?” Lindner pressed lightly, still leafing through the folder.

For all the world he appeared like he barely even cared about the conversation, that he was just making small talk while waiting to find something substantial in the folder to go after. Sherlock wasn’t as easily deceived. Lindner was actually paying close attention to every little word out of Singleton’s mouth and directed the flow of conversation with carefully voiced questions. While Sherlock could see the merit behind this approach and noted a bit of respect to the elder man’s experience, he couldn’t help his impatience. He wanted to get a lead on this case, something to get it moving, and right now Singleton was the only one that could give them that.

“I always called her Liz, she hated it,” Singleton laughed, baring his rotted three teeth.

“Liz, eh? Now what’d she look like? Pretty?”

“Oh yeah. Real doll. Long black hair, prettiest caramel eyes too. She was a real toughie though. Think her an’ her boss had a thing goin’, you know?”

Lindner smiled complacently, nodding along. “How’d you find her?”

“Nah, she found me. Came up to me in a bar where me an’ the boys were playin’ pool, said she could get me in for some good money. I wasn’ much interested at first, but then she started on about this whole plan of her bosses an’ how I could be gettin’ hand on some of the, uh, product if I joined up. Said it was real simple, that she just needed someone who could drive worth a damn,” Singleton added, looking mighty pleased with himself.

“So you joined up? You ever meet her boss?”

“Never even heard his name. Always met up with Lizzy at the Steak ‘n Shake when she needed to meet. She was a server there, I think. Always looked like one at least. She’d always leave the orders under the bill at the end, tellin’ me what I was supposed to do next.”

“Steak and Shake, huh? Which one is that again, the Clayton one?” Lindner asked calmly.

“Nah, further out. Kirkwood.”

Lindner nodded, just a bored bobbing of his head, and jotted down a quick note before closing the file and clasping his hands on top of it, looking for all the world like _this_ was about to be the start of the conversation, that everything prior had just been small talk.

“He’s good,” John murmured.

Sherlock hummed in agreement. “Lestrade could stand to learn a thing or two from this one.”

John nudged his elbow into Sherlock ribs as a gentle reprimand, though his attention was already fixed back on the other room.

“So,” Lindner began, “tell me about the work you were doing with Ms. Deyr. How much did she tell you about the business?”

“Not much. I never got to know nothin’ really. I just picked up an’ delivered stuff,” Singleton huffed.

“What kind of stuff exactly?” Lindner pressed.

“Well, you know. Boxes and stuff. Sounded like glass sometimes.”

Lindner nodded slowly, staring down the man across the table. Sherlock gave him props for managing to stare at such an awful mug for so long without grimacing.

“How much experience do you have with snakes?”

Singleton shifted in his seat, wetting his lips and frowning. “A little. Grew up on a farm so I know how ta catch ‘em and kill ‘em without gettin’ bit.”

“You deal with any recently?”

He shifted again. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Has to do with quite a bit actually. You deal with any lately? Drop one off in a hotel room maybe?”

Singleton’s already greasy dome of a head was perspiring now, and he kept licking his lips. The man had one of the worst poker faces Sherlock had ever seen.

“Ain’t I supposed to have a lawyer in here or somethin’?” Singleton burst out. “I want a lawyer in here.”

Lindner sat back with a barely audible sigh, but nodded. “We’ll get one in for you right away, Mr. Singleton. Another officer will be along shortly to help you get everything settled.”

Lindner stood, sweeping the folder off the table, and heading for the door. Sherlock hurried to meet him in the hallway, John a step behind him, then followed the older man back to his office. Lindner sank down in his chair with a huffed laugh.

“Took him long enough to remember that bit, didn’t it?” Lindner chuckled. “Was kinda hoping he wouldn’t.”

Sherlock nodded, falling into one of the chairs. “Either way, we’ve gotten plenty out of him. And even what he didn’t explicitly tell us was obvious enough.”

“He put the snake in our room,” John started, taking the other chair. “If he didn’t, he definitely knows who did.”

“And now we know how to find this Eliza,” Lindner added, glancing down at his notes. “I’ll send in an undercover to pick up a staff schedule. Can’t risk letting her know we’ve found her, but we need to move before she realizes we’ve got Singleton.”

“Try to find out when the next time he was supposed to meet her is. We already know his involvement, but if he can offer more information you can barter a deal with him. If he’s not meant to meet her tonight, we likely have until mail delivery tomorrow before she finds out,” Sherlock said.

“We’ll have her in before then,” Lindner stated, already reaching for his phone to begin the arrangements.

Normally, Sherlock would scoff at that sort of overconfidence. Internally, he still did a bit, but he had built up an admiration of Lindner’s competence during the past week. Well. That and John shot him a firm warning glare before he had the chance to do anything.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have to throw this up quickly with minimum editing because I am apparently about to be kidnapped by my Wife & Co. in a few minites so. Here go. Not saying Singleton isn't physically based off a currently at large politician but.. No. He is. Gross.  
> I'm not a huge Mycroft/Lestrade shipper, but neither am I against it. I do think Sherlock's reaction to them getting it on would be hilarious though, which is why I threw it in.
> 
> Reminder: I am graduating next weekend and have a crap ton of family/friend get-together obligations to see to, so Chapter 10 may be delayed until either very very late on Sunday night, or very very early Monday morning.


	11. Chapter 10

Sherlock drove them back to the hotel, glaring hatefully at the fat white flakes that landed on the windshield. If he ended up snowed-in again, _now_ of all times, he might have to shoot something. Never mind the fact that their gun was back in London. He’d work something out. There were rubber bands on the desk, weren’t there? He thought he remembered seeing them. Perhaps not. Now, if he could just find a clothespin…

“Stop it,” John ordered amicably from the passenger seat.

“Stop what?” Sherlock grumbled. “I haven’t done anything yet.”

“‘Yet,’” He echoed pointedly.

Sherlock huffed, then amended, “I haven’t done anything.”

“You’re thinking about doing something. That was your plotting face, doubled with your sulking face. You were planning on doing something you know I won’t approve of, so stop it,” John said.

Sherlock shot him a look, frowning, but turned back to the road without a word. It was frightening, sometimes, just how well John had gotten at reading him. He wasn’t sure if he should be concerned by that. Perhaps flattered?

“What were you thinking of anyway?” John asked idly a few minutes later.

“Working out how to make a projectile launcher out of a clothespin or possibly some rubber bands,” Sherlock admitted readily.

John laughed, shaking his head. “Of course you were.”

“If we get snowed-in tomorrow not even you can stop me from making one,” Sherlock warned, but he was smiling now.

John arched a brow at him, eyes glinting in challenge. His expression smoothed out to perfectly innocent a moment later and he stared ahead, one hand casually reaching over to rest on Sherlock’s upper thigh, his thumb lightly stroking over the fabric of his slacks.

“Oh, I can think of a few ways to stop you.”

Sherlock’s mouth went a bit dry.

* * *

They didn’t end up getting snowed in, and Sherlock couldn’t help but feel a tinge of disappointment at that. But only a tinge. There was, after all, still a case to be solved. Considering said case was at last gaining some traction, Sherlock was content enough to leave the hotel before the sun and head down to meet with Lindner at the station.

Eliza had not been working the previous day, and was only scheduled for much later in the evening today. Lindner’s undercover officer had managed to secure her home address and other personal information, and Lindner had set up a watch on her building. He planned to enter the restaurant that evening to bring her in for questioning, and had already gotten a warrant approved for his team to search her car and apartment as soon as he gave the order.

Sherlock had to admire his efficiency, thought he was still rather cross about being left at the station during the arrest and search. He wasn’t even being permitted to question her! At least he’d gotten to talk to Singleton after his lawyer had arrived, though that hadn’t turned up any new information anyway. The man was even more repulsive in person, as it turned out. He’d washed his hands twice after leaving even though he hadn’t even touched him, and was in desperate want of a full shower now. John just laughed at him, completely unsympathetic.

“And they say romance is dead,” Sherlock muttered, drying off his hands.

John ran a hand through the back of Sherlock’s hair. “Oh, hush.”

Singleton’s lawyer, a thin man by the name of Noah Poehler, swept into the room and made a beeline for the sink. Sherlock shot his companion a look at this, quirking an eyebrow, and John just rolled his eyes in response.

Poehler was a younger man, on the wrong side of twenty-five and not quite near thirty, and had the thin, half-starved look of most American students. He wasn’t far out of law school and had yet to make any sort of name for himself, but Lindner had assured that he was trustable and on the side of the law, not money.

“I’ve represented a lot of unsavory people in my time,” Poehler huffed, already vigorously scrubbing down his hands up to the elbow, “but dear lord that man is disgusting.”

“He does seem to be a bit unclean,” John allowed, biting the inside of his cheek to keep from grinning.

“A bit? He hasn’t showered in a month. I asked. And don’t even get me started on the state of his teeth...”

John winced at that. “Okay. That _is_ disgusting.”

“Fitting appearance for a man like him,” Sherlock hummed, wrinkling his nose.

Poehler bobbed his head in agreement, starting a second lather of soap. “Definitely not the most pleasant person I’ve had to work with either… nor the brightest. Not much left for me to defend or barter with when he’s gone and told you all everything before I even got called in, eh? Only thing I _can_ do at this point is make sure his rehab is overseen. Already going through withdrawal, which has made him _oh_ so agreeable,” Poehler added.

“I noticed,” John chuckled. “Thought he was bad before, but blimey. And now he’s gotten himself sexual harassment charges on top of it all.”

Poehler grimaced. “I should probably see if I can get those dropped. Don’t want to, but I should. Did either of you happen to catch the name of that officer he, uh… well, her name?”

“Officer Hanes,” John offered. “And I don’t think she’ll drop them.”

“Don’t think so either. Have to try though,” Poehler sighed, starting to dry off his hands, then pausing and turning back to the sink with a grimace.

Sherlock stared at John, keeping his expression carefully blank. John narrowed his eyes, but the corner of his mouth was twitching a bit. They said a quick goodbye to Poehler before heading out to find lunch. Deyr’s shift didn’t start for another six hours, and Lindner was busy organizing everything, so there was really nothing for them to do in the meantime.

And so, sitting in a booth at a dimly lit and mostly vacant Applebee’s, Sherlock found himself already planning out their next move while skimming the lunch menu. John’s foot nudged him under the table, then again with a bit more force. He looked up, about to complain, and stopped short at the fond expression on his partner’s face. John was smiling slightly, managing to look both exasperated and amused at the same time, and his menu was closed in front of him.

“Penny?” John asked lightly.

Sherlock slowly closed and set aside the menu. “Just considering what we’re to do next.”

“Well, that is simple enough. Arrest Ms. Deyr, get her to tell us who’s she’s working for and where to find them, then arrest the boss,” John stated, simple as that. “Now, stop brooding. We’re fine dining.”

“I would hardly call this ‘fine’ dining, John.”

“Well, it’s certainly a step above the drive-thru burgers from McDonalds we had the other day. Seriously, relax a bit. You said yourself that Lindner seemed competent enough. He’s got this handled, and he’s going to call you the minute anything starts happening, yeah? So, and lord do I know how hard it is for you to _not_ work for just a few minutes, but be here with me now for just a few?” John implored, reaching across the table to take one of Sherlock’s hands in his.

Sherlock swiped a thumb over his hand, smiling a bit. “Alright. I’m here.”

“Good. Now, Lindner recommended the shrimp ‘n parmesan sirloin,” John offered, then paused, eyeing Sherlock. “What are you fiddling with under the table?”

“Oh nothing,” Sherlock hummed innocently, reaching for the toothpicks he’d gotten from the hostess desk.

John sat back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest and glaring. With a dramatic huff, Sherlock placed one of the clothespin guns he’d assembled on the table. John stared at it. Sherlock raised his own, grinning a bit. John stared at him.

“Whoever hits that lemon wedge first gets out of paying the bill,” He announced, waving at the wedge on a glass at the abandoned table across from them.

John slowly picked up the clothespin, alternating between staring at it, the lemon, and Sherlock for all of a minute, then folded over on himself and started _giggling._

* * *

Sherlock had just finished settling the bill when Lindner called.

“She got tipped off,” He growled in lieu of a hello. “I don’t know how, but she did and she’s flown the coop.”

“When? Did you see her leave?” Sherlock demanded.

“Yeah, just twenty minutes ago. Had an officer follow her but they lost her at a light. No idea where she was headed either, but we’ve got everyone on lookout. I’ve flagged her passport and cards too. Until she tries using one of ‘em though, we’re blind,” He spat, frustration more aimed at himself than anyone else.

“Might as well get on with searching her flat then. I doubt she’s left anything obvious. John and I will be there shortly, might be able to find something to point us in her direction,” Sherlock said before hanging up.

John raised an eyebrow at him, already standing to put on his coat. “Deyr make a run for it?”

“It appears so.”

“Well, at least there’s one thing on our side.”

“And what’s that?”

“America. She can drive for half a day and only make it a state or two over. Better than Europe. She’d be in another country by now.”

Sherlock gave him a crooked grin. “Right, I suppose there _is_ that.”

They made it to the complex in good time - though American city drivers were easily some of the most unpleasant people Sherlock had _ever_ dealt with - and were met at the stairs by Lindner. The older man was on his phone, snapping orders to someone and looking surprisingly composed despite his obvious frustration. He hung up as they approached and motioned for them to follow him up to the flat. It was a small place with dated wallpaper and carpet that looked like it had once been a light beige colour, but it was well furnished and clearly well-kept. Not really the place of someone ready to drop everything and run, and it certainly didn’t look like it’s owner had left in a hurry.

“This was planned,” Sherlock murmured, mostly to himself. “She knew she was going to have to leave at some point, had everything she needed already packed together. Was she carrying anything when she came out?”

“Just her purse. There might’ve been a bag already in her car though,” Lindner supplied.

Sherlock gave John a brief nod and headed towards the small kitchen space, John heading off to the desk under the window.

“Fridge is empty of perishables,” Sherlock called out.

“No personal address books over here either,” John responded. “There is an English-to-German one. Was she a student somewhere? Taking a class perhaps?”

“No record of any enrollment this semester, or the last,” Lindner put in, shaking his head.

Sherlock paused, considering. “Did you find her passport here?”

Lindner shook his head again.

“What’s the nearest airport?” John asked.

“Most use the St. Louis Regional up north of here, but there’s several,” Lindner answered. “I already have people at all the main ones, and the metros. She shows up, we’ll see her.”

As if summoned, Lindner’s phone started ringing. Sherlock watched him closely, not missing the minute changes of his expression, and was already reaching for his coat before he’d even hung up.

“We got a hit. Her passport was flagged at Lambert, about twenty-five minutes from here. Let’s move,” Lindner said, already out the door.

Sherlock and John were close behind, Sherlock pulling out the car keys and John instinctively moving for the gun he hadn’t actually brought.

“When’s the flight and where to?” Sherlock asked quickly.

“Boarding is in forty minutes, flight is to Germany. I have a man there who’s going to stall as long as he can. If you’re driving separate, stay close,” Lindner advised.

They made good time, breaking a good number of traffic laws under the protection of Lindner’s siren and lights. Lambert International certainly wasn’t the largest airport Sherlock had ever seen, but it wasn’t small either. Fighting their way through the crowds and security quickly ate up the few minutes their reckless driving had spared, though Lindner’s man had succeeded in delaying the plane without drawing attention to himself. Everyone had boarded, the plane sitting at the end of its ramp and the pilot waiting for them at the top of it and looking not the least bit amused.

“We’ll only be a moment,” Lindner promised before brushing past him.

“You’d better be,” the pilot grumped, following. “I pulled the passenger list, your girl is in F-14.”

“Thank you.”

Lindner moved into the plane, slipping down the aisle with an easy sort of confidence before pausing next to a seat and looking down at its occupant. Sherlock was too far away to hear the exchange, but after a long moment, a thin woman reluctantly stood, retrieved her carry on, and followed Lindner back into the ramp. There, another officer 一 who Sherlock belated recognized as Officer Hanes 一 took the woman’s bag from her as Lindner began securing the cuffs around her wrists.

“Eliza Deyr, you are under arrest for drug trafficking, and the murders of Jack Lara, Alison O’Hara, Christian Jones, Bryan Glass, and Helen McClaire,” Lindner began.

Sherlock tuned him out, already well familiar with the whole spiel, and focused on Eliza. She was a slender woman, her dark brown hair in sharp contrast with her pale skin, and while her clothes were in no means expensive or fanciful, they were well paired and matched. Sherlock absently noticed the shortened nails on one hand - ukulele, he remembered seeing the case for it at her flat - and the slight indents on the bridge of her nose where glasses should have been. Despite having just been publically removed from a plane and the verbal announcement of the accusations against her, she merely looked resigned, and calmly requested her lawyer be contacted and waiting for her at the station.

Sherlock watched her as Lindner escorted her back into the airport, frowning a bit.

“What is it?” John asked.

“That was… easy. No fuss, no attempt to escape. She just… gave up,” Sherlock replied, troubled. “Almost as if she knew this was going to happen.”

“If she knew we were coming for her, why not put up more of an effort to avoid being caught?” John mused in agreement.

“I want to talk to her. Before Lindner,” Sherlock announced, striding off down the ramp.

“Don’t know if he’ll let you,” John huffed.

“Oh, he will.”

Sherlock produced the clothespin gun from his pocket, absently tossing it into the air and catching it. John burst into laughter, falling behind a few steps, and shook his head.

“You are _not_ going to threaten him with a clothespin, Sherlock,” John laughed.

Sherlock hummed absently in response.

“You’re not. No, you are not. _Sherlock!”_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, sorry for the delay. Couldn't be avoided.  
> I no longer have a link for whatever thing it was that showed me how to make a clothespin gun, but they are rather fun. I do not pretend to know the ins-and-outs of police procedure and all that noise, this is a fictional work so we can just run with simplicity, eh?  
> Anyhoo, here is Chapter 10 for your enjoyment, 11 should be up on time. Y'all have a nice week.


	12. Chapter 11

Sherlock did _not_ end up threatening Lindner with the clothespin. The older man was more than happy to let him have the first crack at Eliza, under the unwavering condition that he was to be in the room at the time as well. John, somewhat reluctantly, agreed to stay behind the mirror and record the interrogation. Not that Sherlock expected it to be terribly difficult, Eliza had already agreed to answer any questions they had - much to the severe disapproval of her lawyer. She did, however, say she wouldn’t _give_ any information that wasn’t explicitly asked for.

Tedious, really, but understandable. No need to throw out anything more incriminating if she didn’t have to.

“Hello, Ms. Deyr,” Lindner greeted amicably as they entered the room.

“Detective Lindner,” She replied, tone light but not at all friendly.

“This is Sherlock Holmes, he’s a consultant on this case.”

Sherlock shook the proffered hand. “Ms. Deyr, pleasure to meet you at last. We’ve heard a lot about you.”

“Likewise, Mr. Holmes. I’m flattered,” Eliza paused to smile half sincerely at him, “that you came all this way just for me.”

“Not you,” Sherlock quipped, taking a seat across from her. “No, no. You’re not the mastermind here. I came all this way for _them_. Do you know the name of your employer?”

“Of course I do,” She said simply.

“Care to share?”

Eliza sighed, pausing again for a moment. “His name is Ratica. I never heard his first name.”

“Did you ever meet with him in person?” Lindner piped up.

“Only a few times. Most of our communication was through burner phones.”

“Can you describe him for me?”

Eliza nodded complacently and began describing a man she estimated to be in his early forties, short and thickly built with dark brown, near black hair that was going grey with age. He had pale eyes, hidden by perpetually smudged wire-framed glasses, but was always meticulously clean shaven. He frequently wore slacks and button-up shirts, though she remembered one evening seeing him in a white lab coat, and his clothes were never properly ironed - something that clearly annoyed Eliza to no end.

“Not married then,” Sherlock mentioned at this.

“He had a ring, but it looked like it hadn’t been off in years. I don’t think he _could_ take it off,” She added, nose scrunching in distaste. “Widowed, or divorced and in denial. He was very firm about not talking about himself.”

“What was his game plan with this? Did he ever say _why_ he was running this whole operation?” Lindner asked.

“Money, mostly,” Eliza guessed, shrugging. “It did bring in quite a bit of profit. He was bored too. Whatever his day job was, he clearly hated it.”

Something was nagging at the back of Sherlock’s mind, something important that he wasn’t quite connecting the dots on. It was a physical effort not to display just how irritated he was by this. There really wasn’t much more she could tell him. He didn’t particularly care _why_ Ratica was running the ring, and he’d already figured out _how_ it was all being done. The only thing left was to find the man himself.

“Ms. Deyr,” Sherlock interjected suddenly, cutting Lindner off mid-stream, “why _did_ you go to the airport today? How did you know we were coming?”

“I didn’t exactly, but I knew you would be. As soon as that slimeball Singleton missed his meetup the other night I knew someone had picked him up. I called Ratica and he told me I needed to leave the country. Said he’d meet me in Berlin to regroup… I should’ve known really.”

“Known what, exactly?” Sherlock pressed.

“He wasn’t flying with me. He sent me by myself, knew I’d get caught. I was just bait, a diversion so he could get out of the country before you caught up to him. He’s probably not even headed to Berlin,” Eliza spat, furious with both herself and her employer.

Sherlock’s hand tightened under the table and he stood. “Well, I’ll leave the rest of this to you, Detective. Someone needs to start running a trace for this Ratica fellow.”

Lindner nodded slightly. “Something tells me he didn’t use his own passport to leave though.”

“Undoubtedly. You’ll need to send someone to find that phone.”

“It’s in the dumpster behind my building,” Eliza offered. “Trash doesn’t come till Wednesday, should still be there. At this point, anything I can tell you to help find that jerk, I will.”

“Thank you for your cooperation,” Lindner allowed. “I’ll be back in just a moment to ask you more.”

She gave him a warm smile as he turned to follow Sherlock out of the room. Sherlock paused to wait for John to join them, then led the way to Lindner’s office.

“Do try not to get too blinded by the girl’s act, Lindner,” Sherlock admonished offhandedly, falling into one of the padded chairs in front of the desk.

“Act?” Lindner echoed.

“The whole ‘helpful Samaritan suddenly on the side of the law’ act. She got caught, she knows she’s going to do serious time. Being cooperative and ‘helpful’ will only work in her favour at this point. Ratica was using her as the active operations director here, and that’s not just because she’s attractive,” Sherlock opined. “She’s smart, organized. You saw the state of her flat, everything was in perfect order. Intentionally kept that way. She’s the perfect PA, really. Not to mention she _was_ involved with the disposal of the operation’s assets when their use had dried up.”

Lindner sighed, falling back into his chair and scrubbing a hand over his face. “She’s just a kid. How did she end up in all this?”

“You’ll have to ask her-”

“She already said,” John interrupted.

Both detectives stopped, turning to eye him questioningly.

“Well didn’t she? Money. She’s a student, or was at least. There were several bills on her table that looked like debt collectors. Universities are rather expensive here, aren’t they?” John queried.

Sherlock continued to stare at him.

“Very, more so every year,” Lindner answered. “That makes sense. Kid drowning in student loans, not making enough at her part time jobs to get the collectors off her back… Offer like that, she wouldn’t be able to refuse.”

“She was a forensics major,” John added. “Still had a lot of her text books.”

“Why didn’t you mention any of this before?” Sherlock demanded, still half-stunned.

“We were a bit busy at the time. Didn’t seem too terribly important.”

“It’s _incredibly_ important! Lindner, I need her records. Where was she enrolled?” Sherlock requested, leaning forward in his seat.

Lindner frowned, but obediently fired up his computer to open her file. “St. Louis University, not far from here.

“Same place Alison O’Hara taught chemistry, which is a required course for all forensics. Where did Bryan Glass graduate, and what year?” Sherlock pressed.

A moment of typing, then a pause.

“He graduated from SLU, same year as O’Hara. They probably knew each other then.”

“And what company provides glassware to that university? I’d bet the entirety of John’s wallet it’s the one Christian Jones worked at,” Sherlock said.

“Hey,” John objected.

Lindner’s typing sped up a bit, then stopped.

“You’re right. Same one. What about McClaire? She worked at the Botanical Garden, didn’t go to SLU. What’s the connection there?”

Sherlock paused, considering. “She had a son, out of state university student, yes? What high school did he graduate from?”

“Lindbergh,” Lindner replied immediately. “He was in their band program, mentioned it when he came in to ID his mother’s body. Very good program, that.”

“And Deyr?”

After a moment, Lindner nodded.

“There was a case in her flat,” John noted. “Looked like it might’ve been a clarinet.”

“That clears all that up then. I’ll see if I can’t get her to confirm it. It’s definitely enough to link her to them,” Lindner confirmed. “That’s probably why Ratica chose her, plenty of connections and a major need for cash.”

“Maybe she met him through the school too?” John wondered aloud.

“Let’s ask her,” Lindner decided, standing. “You coming in on this one, Sherlock?”

Sherlock shook his head. “Should be easy enough for you, since she’s being so ‘ _helpful_.’”

They slipped back into the darkened side room, watching as Lindner resettled in the chair across from Eliza. She smiled in response to his greeting and waved away her lawyer, who was hovering unhappily over her shoulder. John shifted, elbow brushing against Sherlock, and hummed thoughtfully.

“What?” Sherlock whispered.

“Why did she ask for a lawyer if she’s just going to ignore everything he tries to do to help her?” He hissed back.

“Didn’t want to talk in public, perhaps? She knows she’s going to court, might as well get a representative from the get go.”

John hmmed again, still watching her with a thoughtful expression. Sherlock turned his attention back to the room, where Lindner was settling some attempted grievance the lawyer was trying to throw out.

“Ms. Deyr, I only have a few questions then we can move you out of this room. First off, Professor O’Hara from SLU. She was your chemistry teacher, wasn’t she?” Lindner asked conversationally.

Eliza nodded. “Yes, she was. She was a nice lady.”

“And you had her killed,” Lindner stated.

She winced, but nodded again. “Ratica wanted to move shop, somewhere different where the police weren’t quite as on to him and his sources weren’t quite as local. Didn’t say where though. He made me clean up his loose ends.”

“And why did you involve her in the first place?”

“I needed to use her lab to test solution levels for the venom cocktail, told her it was for a forensics cold case I was reviewing for my thesis. I couldn’t figure out the right mixture, so I asked her to help me ‘replicate’ it. Once that was done, Ratica decided she knew a bit too much so he had me use her as the first test subject for the cocktail. Worked, um, a bit _too_ well the first time. Didn’t have it right yet,” Eliza admitted, pausing and biting her lip. “He took care of that though. I don’t know how, but he said it wouldn’t be found in the tox screen.”

“Where did the venom come from?”

“Jack Lara. But you already knew that. Ratica put me in contact with him, don’t know how he knew him though,” She added.

Lindner nodded slowly, taking this down on his notepad. “Bryan Glass was a classmate of Professor O’Hara. How did you meet him?”

“They were a bit more than _class_ mates. I think they were dating, but Bryan was clearly still in love with his ex-wife. Anyway, he came into the lab all the time to see her. He talked about his son a lot too, which is how I heard about this savings fund they were holding for him, and how he was worried it wasn’t going to be enough. I approached him about a way to make some quick money. We needed someone who knew their way around a lab to make the more… unsavoury products. Meth is extremely risky, you know.

“So, he became one of our suppliers. There were others, but Ratica had other PA’s - that’s what he called us. I never had contact with them. Bryan also had a small subscription for marijuana, and when he nearly got himself caught for it, Ratica had me take Singleton over to… remove him. We got his bank records and Ratica took the savings money to fund another branch. I was against that, by the way. I know how expensive college is.”

“Seems you would. So would Ian McClaire, your trumpet friend from high school, right? Helen’s son?” Lindner questioned.

Eliza’s gaze dropped and she bit her lip again. This one, Sherlock could tell, was a genuine response.

“Helen has always kept a little weed garden, mostly for herself. I used to visit her now and then for lunch, and she told me how much she was hurting for cash, and that she was worried she’d have to bring Ian home. I offered her a deal. She wasn’t… she wasn’t very keen on it, but she was desperate. She expanded her garden, and was really bringing in some good money out of it all, but she was still upset about it. Ratica didn’t want to risk her blowing everything. I didn’t have anything to do with that one. I just handed Singleton the address and the cocktail,” She ended weakly.

Lindner gave her a moment before asking the next question. “And Mr. Jones?”

“Saw him making a delivery to the lab one evening. He wasn’t above making some under the table cash, was easy to get him in. But… he wasn’t very good at covering it up. Ratica wanted Jones gone before his bosses caught on.”

“Thank you, Ms. Deyr. I just have one more question for you, then we can get you moved out of this room,” Lindner promised. “Where did you first meet Ratica?”

Eliza paused a moment. “My forensics class took a trip to visit a morgue, poke around a bit. He was one of the men in the lab, but he didn’t look like he’d been working there. One of our assignments was to interview the staff, and I thought he looked interesting so I approached him. He was… nice. We talked for a while, and when it was time to leave he gave me a number, said he might have a job for me once I graduated and that I should call if I was interested. I did and… well,” She sighed, shrugging.

In the other room, Sherlock closed his eyes, his chin falling to his chest as he let out a long breath. The nagging feeling in the back of his head finally snapped into sense.

“Oh,” He breathed.

* * *

 “Why are you at my computer?” Lindner asked suspiciously, gaze shifting between John and Sherlock where they sat behind his desk.

“Just… confirming a suspicion,” Sherlock sighed.

“Oh?”

“The forensic analyst you introduced us to when we first got here.”

“Seven? What about him?”

“What was his last name?”

Lindner stopped, dropping into one of the padded chairs across from them. Sherlock could practically see his mind working.

“You know, I’ve known that man for eight years, and I have no idea,” Lindner admitted.

“Apparently, neither do your systems. His employment records don’t even have a home address. The whole thing has been wiped, years ago by the look of it,” Sherlock explained tiredly. “Present yourself with a memorable or unique enough first name and no one will care if they never catch the last.”

Lindner sat back heavily, letting out a long breath. “It’s him, isn’t it? Ratica. Matches Deyr’s description, and he was the only one who could’ve tampered with the autopsy reports. Covering his tracks the whole time, wasn’t he?”

“It would appear so. And just in case we weren’t convinced, I checked flight history for the week he went missing. A man by the name of Timothy Ratica, whose driver's license picture is the spitting image of our Seven, boarded a five p.m. flight to Berlin, Germany, on March fifth,” Sherlock reported. “Before he left, nearly all of his bank account was either emptied in cash or transferred to an offshore account that I can’t trace.”

“He’s in the wind then.”

“Quite.”

“I’ll make a few calls, see what I can do. All that’s left to do here is take Deyr and Singleton to court. Don’t think we’ll be getting Ms. Chambers her money back,” Lindner added with a sullen sigh. “Though there might be something left in Ratica’s account…”

“We catch Ratica and that won’t be an issue,” John said firmly before turning to Sherlock. “What about Mycroft? He has his ways, I bet he could find him no problem.”

Sherlock grimaced. “I’d really rather _not_ be in his debt again. I only just paid off the last one.”

John gave him an exasperated look.

“Fine. I’ll… I’ll talk to him when we get back.”

“Thank you.”

“When will you two be leaving then?” Lindner asked curiously.

“I would like to stay to see Deyr and Singleton convicted, but it’d probably be best that we get back to London and contact my brother. He as access to… everything, really,” Sherlock allowed, giving John a grudging look. “We can get started on hunting Ratica there.”

“Keep in touch though, yeah?” Lindner hinted.

“Of course,” John assured. “We’ll need to see Ms. Chambers before we leave, so we’ll be off either tomorrow evening or the day after.”

“Right then. It’s been a pleasure working with you boys,” Lindner intoned. “If I ever get a real good case, I’ll be sure to let you know.”

Sherlock rose to accept his hand, leaving John to finish off all the pleasantries. Before long they were back in the car and heading back to their rooms, both content to sit in the near silence of the cab, radio off, and watch the darkening sky before them. The case still didn’t _feel_ done. And it wasn’t, not really, but even Sherlock couldn’t delude himself that they had any chance of finding Ratica. Not if the man didn’t want to be found. Unless he surfaced on his own, there wasn’t much that could be done.

Sherlock hated it. He wanted to stay behind for the court dates, to obtain at least _some_ form of closure, but he could tell John missed Baker Street. If he was honest with himself, Sherlock did too. And he _really_ couldn’t make himself stay behind without John, not now. He couldn’t help with the convictions any more than he already had, him staying wouldn’t truly make a difference at this point. What little he could do was back in London, and that was only to talk to Mycroft. If his brother decided to be difficult, he would have John talk to Lestrade and everything would be sorted out. Simple. But no closure.

John’s hand came to rest over his where it sat on the gear shift. Not holding, just a steady weight against his hand. His thumb brushed idly over Sherlock’s, and he felt himself relax ever so slightly. The case, perhaps, hadn’t been really as exciting or fulfilling as he’d hoped, no. More frustrating than anything really. But he had gotten something out of it, something more than worthy enough for the blog.

Sherlock gently turned his hand over, lacing his fingers through John’s.

Definitely, more than worthy.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Getting down to the end here. There's roughly four or so chapters left after this one.  
> Have a nice week!


	13. Chapter 12

They met with Ms. Chambers and her son for lunch the next day, at the same little café they’d met at the first time. John bought them coffees and scones, the latter of which Sherlock grudgingly picked at. He left the talking to John, piping up when necessary but otherwise leaving all of it to the “people” expert. John was better at delivering bad news. He had far more tact than Sherlock, who would’ve bluntly said “the mastermind behind all this escaped, we can’t get your money back, and your ex-husband was involved in a drug trafficking operation. Have a good day.”

Yes, definitely better to leave it to John.

They were both, understandably, rather upset by the news. John promised them that he was going to make sure they utilized every resource available in order to find Ratica once they got back to London, and Ms. Chambers thanked them for all that they had done. For once, Sherlock found that he actually cared that his clients hadn’t gotten the results they deserved. It made him even more frustrated over the collapse of the case.

It was that sudden surge of empathy that pressed him to refuse Ms. Chambers’ attempt of payment, and for once John didn’t try to argue with him on it. Sherlock assured her they’d received consultant fees from Detective Lindner - which they had - and instead handed over a few papers he’d gotten from Lindner’s office about scholarship opportunities Jaydon was more than qualified for. It wouldn’t completely replace the money he’d lost, but it was better than nothing. Jaydon, who was still more than a little beaten down over the news of his father’s involvement, accepted these with the first smile he’d granted them during the entire meeting.

With a final promise to keep them updated with any developments, Sherlock and John headed back to their rental car and began the trek to the airport. He could tell by John’s silence that he wasn’t appeased either, and very nearly suggested that they stay just a little bit longer. It wouldn’t do any good.

It was well into the next day by the time they stumbled into the comfort of 221B, and by some silent agreement they both ended up curled up together in Sherlock’s bed. By the time either of them were functional enough to move and rejoin the world of the living, the sky was already darkening. True to his word, Sherlock reluctantly called his brother and had a long, tedious, and exhausting bickerment with the elder Holmes. Mycroft did finally relent and agree to assist them, but only after Sherlock threatened to send John to Lestrade.

“This whole disgusting involvement between my brother and Lestrade might actually prove useful,” Sherlock announced after he’d tossed his phone away and flopped carelessly onto the sofa.

“I would tell you that you can’t use Greg to control Mycroft, but you’d ignore me anyway,” John sighed, steadily pecking away at his laptop. “Besides, I’m not sure I want to stop you.”

Sherlock grinned. “Good, because I plan to exploit his weakness at every possible opportunity.”

John just chuckled under his breath and continued typing. Mrs. Hudson appeared not much later with a tray of scones and tea, and Sherlock gladly tolerated her fussing under his usual insincere complaints. He’d never admit it aloud, but he’d missed the landlady. She, however, was very vocal about it, so Sherlock allowed her to continue fussing for much longer than he usually would before shooing her off.

“Writing a post for the blog?” Sherlock asked once she’d gone.

“Catching up on email actually,” John corrected. “Didn’t figure I’d write about this one till it’s done.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Not at all and you know that. Put the kettle on, dear?”

“‘Dear?’”

“No? Just trying it out. Anyway, put the kettle on?”

Sherlock let out an amused huff, but levered himself to his feet anyway and moved into the kitchen. John, out of laziness or habit, would often just throw a mug in the microwave when making tea for himself, the heathen. Sherlock knew it was mostly because he hadn’t exactly had access to kettles while in the army. No excuse now, of course. He was in a _civilized_ place now, and had a perfectly usable kettle (unless Sherlock used it for an experiment, which did occasionally happen). So there was really no excuse for it anymore, but Sherlock was often the one to make the tea anyway. John did the coffee 一 the machine had something against Sherlock, he was convinced of it 一 and Sherlock did the tea.

Sherlock poked idly at a mold experiment he’d left by the sink before they’d left, waiting for the kettle to whistle. Despite having slept through most of the afternoon, he still felt travel-tired. As soon as he could manage it, he’d find a way to lure John back to his room. Or perhaps John’s room would be better. His was further away from Mrs. Hudson.

He pulled over a random piece of paper from their table and immediately started sketching up his renovation plans for his bedroom, offhandedly keeping track of the expense requirements on the side.

“-lock. Sherlock!” John’s voice broke through his train of thought.

He looked up, confused.

“The kettle,” John reminded simply, sounding terribly fond.

The loud wail finally registered.

“Oh. Oh! Tea, right. Coming right up.”

Sherlock hurried through preparing the teas and dropped John’s beside him along with the plans for his new lab. John carefully picked up the latter, then turned it over to see what he’d written it on, and sighed.

“Sherlock. This is one of the forms we had to fill out and mail back to Lindner,” John pointed out tiredly.

“We’ll make a copy then, fax it back.”

“Do those even exist anymore? Who has a fax machine?”

“I do, actually,” a third voice interrupted from the doorway.

“See, Lestrade has one. Problem solved. Now, back to the _important_ bit-”

“Greg!” John called out, standing to greet the man and completely abandoning the paper.

Sherlock huffed in annoyance and plopped himself down in front of John’s laptop to check his own email while the two caught up. He was actually quite glad to see the elder man, though that was also something he wouldn’t be caught dead voicing aloud. Can’t let Lestrade know he was actually just slightly above the “tolerate” level on Sherlock’s scale.

“Look, I know you two have _just_ gotten back in, but I’ve got something,” Lestrade offered, having raised his voice ever so slightly in order to draw Sherlock’s attention back to him, “and it’s really kind of important.”

“Yes, what is it?” Sherlock asked absently.

There was an odd mix of excitement and resentment at this. He hadn’t _finished_ the other case yet, and now he was jumping into a new one. Hadn’t even been 24-hours yet.

“Kidnapping, we think. Twelve-year-old girl came home after school, called from the landline to tell her mother she’d made it in, and when the mother got home the kid was gone. All doors and windows were locked, the girl’s bag and shoes were where she always left them, homework still on the kitchen table. So far we haven’t heard anything about ransom,” Lestrade explained, then turned solely to Sherlock. “Come take a look?”

Sherlock turned to John, raising an eyebrow.

“Eh, never been one for holidays much anyway. Back to work then?” John sighed, though he was smiling back at him.

“Back to work then,” Sherlock agreed.

* * *

Three long, mildly stressful days later, they stumbled back into the comfort of 221B and collapsed beside each other on the sofa. The child had been safely recovered and returned from where she’d been locked away by the mother’s ex-boyfriend (whom she’d broken up with _several_ years ago because she’d thought he was creepy) and the ex arrested. They hadn’t really given themselves proper time to fix their sleep cycles, and even Sherlock would gladly submit to the oncoming jet-lag crash.

“Should probably move to a bed while we still can,” Sherlock mumbled reluctantly.

John groaned at the simple thought.

“Your back won’t forgive you for it.”

“ _Fine.”_

Neither of them made to get up.

Sherlock’s phone started ringing from his pocket.

They both groaned.

“ _Fine,”_ John repeated, struggling to his feet and pulling Sherlock up with him. “You answer that, I’m getting changed. Come up when you’re done.”

John ambled over to the stairs and began the slow, painful climb up to his room. With a great deal of reluctance, Sherlock withdrew his phone and glared balefully at the screen.

“What do you want, Mycroft?” He snapped.

“Hello to you too, brother dearest,” Mycroft purred back. “Just getting back to you on your runaway drug lord, unless you no longer have interest in catching him…?”

Sherlock held his tongue, waiting.

“There was a small hit in Saarbrücken, Germany, two hours after his flight landed in Berlin. His passport was found on a table of a local diner, turned in by a helpful citizen. Since then, one of my people has gotten a potential sighting via CCTV in France, just yesterday evening in fact. Your man is on the move,” Mycroft added helpfully.

Sherlock sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Unless you can give me something _useful_ and concrete, this call is rather unnecessary, _brother dearest._ ”

“Such impatience,” Mycroft tsked. “I did find something concrete. There was a note in his passport, the hard copy of a flier. It would seem Mr. Ratica is rather cross with you for ruining his business back in the states.”

“Get _on_ with it, Mycroft,” Sherlock spat.

“He’s put a bounty on your head. Quite a sizeable one too. As far as I can tell, the message has yet to reach London, but do keep your head down. I’m sure John wouldn’t want a repeat of… well, you know.”

Sherlock grit his teeth so hard he had the slight background worry of cracking one.

“He’s also placed one on the good doctor’s head, if that will inspire you to take care.”

Sherlock vision took on a reddish tint. “Next time, _lead_ with that and don’t waste my time.”

His phone landed on the sofa with an unsatisfactory _thump,_ but he couldn’t be bothered to attempt throwing it at something more solid. He suddenly didn’t really feel like sleeping, catching Ratica was now more important than _anything_. He’d made it personal. Sherlock could hardly care about having a hit out on him, that happened all the time. But John? Really. Anyone who’d payed _any_ attention to the whole Moriarty fiasco should _know_ just how much that was not going to fly, and just how Sherlock was going to react to that threat.

“Sherlock?” John’s voice called down the stairs.

Sherlock sighed, forcing himself to relax and breathe.

“Sherlock, you coming to bed?”

Slowly, he turned off the lights and began to make his way up the stairs. John was waiting for him at the top and smiled in greeting, reaching out to take his hand.

“That your brother on the phone?” He asked lightly. “Have anything useful?”

“Only that Ratica has abandoned his passport and made an appearance in France,” Sherlock replied, allowing John to nudge him down onto the bed.

“Not much to go off of,” John acknowledged.

Sherlock shook his head tiredly. “I’ll start looking into it more tomorrow.”

John hummed in response, already rounding the bed to fall in. Sherlock slowly reclined back, hesitated a moment, then rolled over to rest his head on John’s shoulder and slide an arm around his middle.

* * *

John left for Tesco just shy of noon, leaving Sherlock to his own devices. He’d been invited, of course, but once was definitely more than enough. Instead, Sherlock trudged his way through the slew of emails that’d come in while they’d been gone, picking through the spam and sending short responses to only a few that either had promise or were just so ridiculous he couldn’t help but berate them a bit. He was only halfway through the list when his phone started ringing out, Lestrade’s name flashing up from the screen.

Curious, Sherlock answered.

“What did you do?” Lestrade demanded as soon as the line opened.

“Good morning to you too, George,” Sherlock responded snidely.

“Funny. Now seriously, what who did you piss off this time? I’ve gotten _fifteen_ death threats against you in the past hour, that’s a record high even for you so you must’ve pissed someone off.”

Sherlock sat up from where he was sprawled on the sofa, interested now. “Oh? Any clue who it’s from?”

“All anonymous. There’s ten for John too,” Lestrade added.

Sherlock’s grip tightened on the phone.

“So, any idea who it is?” Lestrade pressed.

“I know exactly who it is. Drug lord from the case John and I just got back from in the States, name of Timothy Ratica. He fled to Germany just before we came back, since then Mycroft has tracked him to France. Apparently he’s a bit cross about us having ruined his operation before he was ready. He’s put out a sizeable bounty on our heads, but it hasn’t reached London just yet,” Sherlock informed. “Or perhaps it has by now. Certainly been long enough.”

Over the line, Lestrade let out a breathy laugh. “Of course. You sure know how to make friends, don’t you? How’s John handling the news?”

Sherlock paused.

“You _did_ tell him, didn’t you?” Lestrade asked, tone taking on distinct disapproval.

“Not just yet. I’m going to.”

“ _Sherlock_.”

“No need to concern him while it’s not yet a real concern,” Sherlock protested.

“You have until tonight to tell him. It’s pub night, and don’t expect me _not_ to,” Lestrade warned.

“Fine. Aren’t you supposed to be working?”

“Day off, thanks. Tomorrow too. Send over what you’ve got on this Ratica guy, I’ll see if there’s anything I can do. And be careful, would ya? None of us can handle another funeral, Sherlock.”

“I’ll email over what we have by four. You should call the detective we worked with, Lindner, he’ll have more by now,” Sherlock suggested, pointedly ignoring the last bit.

Lestrade didn’t mention it again either, moving on to talk about a cold case he’d dug up that Sherlock might be interested in. Mindless busy work, really, but it was something to do until a real case came along again. It sounded simple enough, and Sherlock agreed to take a look even though he wasn’t anywhere near the boredom stage of truly _needing_ a case just yet.

True to his word, Sherlock told John about the threats and bounty as soon as he got in. John was actually more amused by it than truly concerned, but made a point to carry his Sig with him when he left again later that evening to meet with Lestrade. Sherlock retired to his own bed that night, still on a bit unsure footing with the whole thing now that they were back in London, and was mildly surprised when John joined him late into the night, only partially drunk from his night out. He was a bit more clingy than normal, flopping himself almost entirely over Sherlock instead of his usual half-on, and Sherlock was even more surprised to find he honestly didn’t mind it that much.

The following day was a rare day of sun with hardly a single cloud in the sky. Sherlock, both out of boredom and a spur of the moment decision to try this “couple” stuff, dragged John out of the flat and down to Regents Park. John was shockingly reluctant to the whole ordeal, his mood souring considerably the longer they were outdoors.

“Is this alright?” Sherlock finally demanded, only thirty minutes into their walk.

John startled. “What?”

“Is this alright? This, being out in public thing,” Sherlock clarified, waving a hand to encompass both them and the park. “We… We don’t have to, if it makes you uncomfortable. I don’t expect-”

“What? No, god no. No, that’s not it at all. Of _course_ I’m alright with being in public with you, Sherlock. Why on earth wouldn’t I be?”

Sherlock offered a small shrug in response, ducking his head away. “You don’t seem particularly enthusiastic about all this.”

“I’m not, really,” John admitted. “But that’s not to do with you, I promise.”

“What is it then?” Sherlock asked, trying and failing to hide just how much he wanted to fix this.

“It’s… complicated, alright?” He sighed, glaring up at the sky as if it had personally insulted his mother.

Sherlock followed his gaze, frowning. It was something to do with the weather. Perhaps the rare sunshine was reminding him of being shot?

“Is it an Afghanistan thing?” Sherlock guessed quietly, not missing how John immediately tensed up at his words. It was then.

“Something like that yeah. Not right now okay?” John half pleaded, shoulders hunching. “I’ll explain someday, I promise, just… not right now, yeah?”

Sherlock nodded in acceptance, subtly steering their path back towards the flat. John didn’t talk about Afghanistan often, usually only in a passing comment about something he and his army mates had done, a food he’d tried or place he’d been. On only a handful of occasions, when he’d come downstairs late in the night for tea after a particularly bad nightmare, would they actually talk about the darker bits of his time there. Sherlock knew better than to press. He didn’t often feel up to talking about his time “away” either. John would tell him when he was ready.

A hand laced through his after a few minutes of strained silence, and Sherlock felt himself relax. He gave the hand a gentle squeeze, and started up the “people watching” game that they often did when out. By the time they reached the flat, John was wearing a small smile, his shoulders less tense than they’d been all day. There was still a slight hint of strain around his eyes, and he wasn’t participating as actively in their game as he normally would, but it was enough. Sherlock decided to count the outing as only a partial success, and attempted to further make up for his error by ordering John’s favourite take out and allowing him to put in one of his terrible films with only a few half-hearted complaints.

Apparently he’d done _something_ right by that, because they weren’t even halfway through the movie before Sherlock found himself straddling John’s hips, one hand braced against the back of the sofa and the other curled into the back of his hair. His trousers had been flung off somewhere, John’s shoved carelessly down past his knees, and Sherlock was busying himself sucking a bruise into the side of John’s neck. John, trying desperately to muffle his moans into Sherlock’s shoulder, was already working a third, well slicked finger into him. Sherlock only tolerated this for a minute before his impatience won out, and firmly swatted John’s hand away.

He couldn’t quite hold back the long, breathless moan that escaped as he lowered himself onto John’s length. John laughed, keeping his hands firm on Sherlock’s hips to hold him in place.

“ _Hush,”_ John scolded. “Mrs. Hudson’s still downstairs, you know.”

“Oh, please. She’s heard much worse from us over the years,” Sherlock scoffed, beginning to roll his hips in a firm grind.

John’s hands tightened, guiding the motion. “True. But not _this._ She doesn’t need to hear us buggering each other.”

“John, she’s been convinced we were ‘buggering each other’ since the day you moved in. I do think she’d be rather delighted to be proven right,” Sherlock added.

“Oh dear lord… Can we please _not_ talk about Mrs. Hudson during sex anymore?”

Sherlock laughed, easing into a faster rhythm. “You’re the one who brought her up, not me.”

John just rolled his eyes and turned his focus into thrusting up into him. Sherlock agreed full heartedly with this, darting in to claim John’s lips in an admittedly sloppy kiss. It was a bit too wet with them both panting into each other’s mouths, though Sherlock found it more than perfect. He picked up the pace, thighs trembling as he did.

And then his phone rang.

They both froze mid movement, listening. Sherlock began to twist to look for the device in question only to be forcibly turned back to face John.

“Alright, new rule,” John announced, beginning to hitch his hips up in small, shallow thrusts, “no phones during sex either.”

“But what if it’s Lestrade? Or Lindner?” Sherlock said weakly. “It could be important-“

His protest was morphed into a strangled shout as John slammed up into him.

“Right, yes,” Sherlock gasped. “No phones. God, yes. Do that again.”

John barked out a laugh, stretching up to claim another kiss before gladly repeating his actions.

 

Mrs. Hudson tittered about in a rather smug fashion the following morning when she came up for a visit.


	14. Chapter 13

It had been four months since Sherlock and John had returned to London, and the failure to obtain closure for the “Got Mail?” case (as John had so gleefully dubbed it) was still a daily source of annoyance. Deyr and Singleton had both received life sentences, though Deyr was currently tied up in legal disputes over whether she should receive capital punishment instead. Lindner was keeping them updated on its progression, but it looked like it wouldn’t be going through.

Death threats came in weekly from Ratica for both Sherlock and John, though so far there hadn’t been any actual physical threats against them. The bounty had died off quickly - Mycroft’s work, no doubt - and there’d been absolutely no sign of Ratica save for the threats. Sherlock wasn’t terribly concerned by this. The man had to surface eventually. Until then, Sherlock was content working cases with Lestrade and private clients.

Even after four months, there were still unfamiliar sensations and data to process with this relationship. It was all so new, and Sherlock could gladly spend days exploring nothing else. And still, John’s apparent hatred for sunny days continued to be a puzzle at the forefront of Sherlock’s mind. The doctor had yet to explain the reasoning behind this, so Sherlock took to avoiding outings on good-weathered days. Fortunately, those were not too terribly common in London. On those days that they did stay in, Sherlock was sure to draw the curtains and pull out John’s terrible collection of movies. John clearly appreciated this, but there was a visible underlying note of distress in his manner nonetheless.

It finally came to a head one evening in July when Sherlock exited his renovated lab and found his partner standing in front of one of the large sitting room windows, staring at the clear, slowly darkening sky and chewing on the side of his thumb, a small wrinkle of pain in his brow. This time, Sherlock couldn’t just leave it alone. He crossed the room and wound his arms around the smaller man’s waist, dipping his head down to rest his chin on John’s shoulder.

“Tell me?” He asked softly.

John’s hands came to rest over Sherlock’s and he let out a long, almost sad sigh. His eyes never left the sky, but he did nod slightly and lean back into Sherlock.

“I used to have this night light when I was little,” John said, voice so quiet Sherlock almost missed it. “It was this cheesy sunshade, didn’t even put out much light. My mum would sing to me when I had a nightmare, that I was her sunshine and that seeing the sun should make me happy from now on, remind me that she loved me.”

John stopped for a few minutes, lost in the memories. Sherlock remained silent where he was. He waited.

“Afghanistan is nothing but sun, all-day. It never bothered me. Mum died while I was there, and seeing it helped. But… there was this kid, Private Jason Wilson. Good kid, always in such good spirits all the time. He’d gotten hit while on patrol, three bullets to the lower abdomen, all mostly superficial though. He would talk about his mum sometimes. She worked at a garden, so any time it rained she couldn’t go into work. He used to wish for clouds, because they reminded him of her, made him happy…

“I… I’d noticed that his wounds looked off, and he was a bit flushed that day. I’d meant to tell the guy covering him next shift to keep an eye on it, but there was this new admission - an IED - and I just got caught up with trying to save him and…” John trailed off, swallowing thickly.

Sherlock pressed a gentle kiss just below his ear, a silent encouragement. John gave his hand a gentle squeeze in response.

“He died, that night. The infection set in so fast and he was just gone. It was sunny when I got the news, not a cloud in sight. It was the very next day that I got shot. And when I was laying there, dying, there was this one cloud up there. One stupid damn cloud. And it was just… it wasn’t fair. That he died without the sky he loved, under my sky, and then there I was dying under his.”

John stopped then, biting his lip and shaking ever so slightly. He leaned back more into Sherlock’s hold, still staring at the nearly set sun, and let out a shaky breath. Sherlock slowly turned him away from the window, towards him, and tightened his arms around him. Sherlock pressed a slow, painfully gentle kiss to John’s lips.

“Thank you,” Sherlock murmured, “for telling me.”

John sank forward to rest his head on Sherlock’s sternum, fingers clutching lightly at Sherlock’s sleeves.

“You fixed my leg, think you can fix this too?” John joked weakly.

“I’ll do my best,” Sherlock promised seriously. “Come on, we still haven’t finished that awful Bond marathon you insist on tormenting me with.”

John let out a surprised laugh, shaking his head. “It’s not awful-”

“It is. Truly atrocious. Go get it set up, I’ll call for Tai. The usual?”

He nodded, slowly pulling away and out of Sherlock’s arms. Sherlock dropped a quick kiss to the side of his head on the way by, already pulling up his phone and scrolling through his contacts. By the time their food arrives, John had gotten the movie set up and was in the process of collecting a few beers from the fridge. Normally Sherlock preferred whiskey or even wine, but tonight he wasn’t about to complain. Besides, John’s taste in beer wasn’t _too_ terrible.

They settled in together at the little kitchen side-table - the actual table currently occupied by one of Sherlock’s experiments that he couldn’t be bothered to move to the lab just yet - and steadily picked their way through the meal, a steady, comfortable flow of banter between them. Afterwards, they curled in together on the sofa and John started up the film. It’s all horribly domestic, and something Sherlock would never have expected himself to enjoy under any circumstances. And while there were still plenty of times when either of them needed their space from the other, they both enjoyed these quiet nights in together all the same.

Ratica was still there, a small constant in the back of Sherlock’s mind, but he was on to a bigger, more important puzzle now, and Ratica was of no pressing concern anymore. The threats had been dwindling, there was no sign of the man anywhere, and nothing for Sherlock to go off of even if he did feel the sudden urge to hunt him down quickly. For now, Sherlock is more than happy to devote his efforts into this new project. John would probably give it some silly title if he knew. Project Nightlight or Sunshine or… on second thought, that worked rather well. Project Sunshine it was.

* * *

“Sherlock, you need to take this _seriously-”_

Sherlock fell back into the tall-backed, overly posh seat with an annoyed huff. “I can assure you, nothing is more serious to me than John’s safety.”

“And your own?” Mycroft countered harshly.

Sherlock leveled him with a stony look.

“I thought at much.”

Mycroft leaned forward over his impeccably clean desk - really, it was hard to believe he ever lifted a finger in the name of work - and glared down at his younger brother. Sherlock arched an eyebrow snidely in return. He’d only been here a grand total of ten minutes, and he’d been fully regretting his decision to come for all of nine minutes.

“Ratica’s threats have been decreasing in frequency, yes, but they have upped in aggression. The latest suggests that he’s rather close,” Mycroft mused.

“And what, exactly, do you suggest?” Sherlock demanded.

“You need to draw him out. He’s not going to surface on his own until it’s too late. Ratica has proven himself to be rather adept at avoiding detection, and he’s clearly relentless.”

Sherlock paused, considering. “Ideas?”

“You’ve been hiding away these past few months, rather domestic these days. Be seen in public more. He might be waiting for an opportunity.”

“So, you want me to give him one? Where is this concern over my safety you were so vehemently preaching about earlier, brother dear?” Sherlock sneered. “I won’t risk John that way.”

“Yet you have no problem risking yourself, which undoubtedly would cause Doctor Watson even more distress than his own danger,” Mycroft pointed out.

“It’s mutual.”

“Clearly. I will have my people shadowing you should you decide to get some sun,” He announced with an air of dismissal.

Sherlock stood, retrieving his coat and shrugging into it. He paused in doing up his scarf, though, turning back to his brother without the tiniest hint of facial expression.

“You know, Lestrade has been looking quite pale lately, and you’re practically a vampire yourself,” Sherlock mused aloud. “Perhaps you should take him out… you know, to get some sun.”

Mycroft’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “Perhaps.”

Sherlock left with his usual flourish, making sure to pester “Anthea” adequately on his way out. It was a private little game between them, which usually escalated in John’s presence simply to poke fun at his past futile flirting attempts, and Sherlock would admit to having an amount of respect for the woman who put up with his brother on a 24/7 basis without giving into homicidal tendencies.

Sherlock would never have been able to manage _that._ He’d only spent fifteen minutes with the man and he was feeling a bit twitchy. Best not, though. John wouldn’t be thrilled to find out Sherlock had gone out without telling him, which he would only find out about if Sherlock failed to beat him home. And with his insistence on taking a cab rather than one of Mycroft’s pompous cars, he was pushing it on time right now. So, better not then.

Sherlock made it home a bare ten minutes before John, which was just enough time to change back into his pajamas, get himself a bit disheveled looking, and flop himself onto the sofa to reassume the exact position John had left him in.

There was a small amount of nagging guilt about keeping John in the dark about Ratica’s movements. He knew that there were still threats, but not the content of them. John had been happier lately, more so than he had been in a very long time, and Sherlock would do everything in his power to maintain that. John deserved to be happy.

“You keep brooding that hard and it’s going to start raining in here,” John commented, breaking Sherlock out of his thoughts.

He startled, head twisting around to find his partner seated in his usual chair with a hot cup of tea cradled in his hands. A matching mug sat on the table beside the sofa, steam still curling off its surface. Sherlock slowly sat up and eyed it.

“Didn’t hear you come in,” He admitted, reaching for it.

“Noticed. So, new case in the wings?” John guessed.

“No, an old one. Just… going over things again. Deyr’s final hearing is today, few hours from now if I’m not mistaken,” Sherlock remembered.

John nodded. “Doubt she’ll get the needle, but Lindner promised to call afterwards anyway.”

“Heard anything from Ms. Chambers?” Sherlock asked.

“Yes, actually. Apparently a whole pile of solid scholarships landed in Jaydon’s lap the other day,” John reported, eyes twinkling. “You wouldn’t happen to have had anything to do with that, now would you?”

“Oh, not at all,” He said innocently. “But I’m sure they were all clearly deserved and will get him into practically any school of his choice.”

“Clearly,” John echoed in amusement. “By the way, Molly swung by whilst you were… brooding. She dropped something off for you.”

Sherlock perked up, all but springing off the sofa and over the coffee table. As promised, the bag of fresh fingernails was waiting for him on the kitchen counter, and Sherlock gleefully scooped it up and made a beeline for his lab.

“Whatever it is you’re doing with those, you’d better be wearing your lab goggles,” John threatened.

Sherlock called back a quick assent, already planning out exactly how to go about this experiment. It had caught his interest during the last case, where a chemistry professor had been murdered by a coworker through the use of sulfuric acid. Quite brutal, really, but Sherlock had offhandedly noted that the man’s fingernails had melted rather oddly. That observation had led him to wonder just how human nails reacted with acids and other potent chemicals. The experiment served no other purpose than entertainment, really.

Sherlock had been deeply involved in the study for several hours when John appeared in the doorway. He was frowning, laptop cradled in one arm. Sherlock carefully set aside the beaker of hydrochloric he’d been about to pour.

“You’re frowning. Why are you frowning, I’m wearing the goggles. And gloves! Look!” Sherlock rushed, raising his hands to show off the thick gloves.

“You need to come read this,” John said softly.

Sherlock froze for a moment. Something was wrong. What could be wrong on his computer? Did he receive another threat? They’d come in through the blog now and then, but it’d been closer to the normal hate mail they regularly received than Ratica’s.

“What is it?” Sherlock asked, slowly taking off his gloves and goggles.

“A death certificate.”

“What?”

Sherlock quickly rounded the table and took the laptop from him. On screen was an email from Lindner containing only an attached .PDF. Sherlock opened it and immediately sagged into the doorframe. John moved to look over his shoulder at the screen.

“Eliza Deyr, female, age twenty-four…” John read aloud, skimming over the document. “Cause of death-”

“Defenestration,” Sherlock breathed.

John frowned, glancing up at him.

“Perhaps we should give Detective Lindner a call and find out why Ms. Deyr has met her end through a window?” Sherlock suggested tightly.

“She was thrown out a window,” John repeated slowly, trying to process it.

“Apparently.”

“Well then. Wait-” John cut off, taking the laptop back. “There’s another one.”

“Singleton?” Sherlock guessed.

John nodded, grimacing. “Um… Overdose.”

“On what?”

“Um… Laxatives.”

Sherlock paused. “You’re joking.”

“Ah, no. This one has a small note from Lindner. Singleton’s food was laced, and he was too stubborn to call from help so he… They found him on the toilet this morning,” John read off, nose crunching in distaste. “Lindner says he’ll call later, he’s dealing with chaos right now.”

“This was Ratica,” Sherlock growled. “It couldn’t have been anyone else. Lindner has been picking up stragglers of his business for months, not all of them alive. He’s still trying to clean up shop.”

John nodded, still frowning as he pecked out a one-handed response on his computer. “You should call your brother.”

“What? Why would I want to do that?” Sherlock choked, completely derailed.

“Ratica is upping his game. It wouldn’t have been easy to organize this right under Lindner’s nose. Both Deyr and Singleton were under surveillance constantly. He could have left them alone, there wasn’t anything more they could give that could be tied back to him, but he had them killed anyway. This looks like an end game,” John reckoned. “And these were both… _violent._ I think it’s a message.”

Sherlock tensed. “You think he’s going to make his move.”

“This is the first activity we’ve seen from him in months,” John pointed out. “It kind of fits the behaviour we’ve seen from people in the past.”

“You’re right. It is… I’ll… Yes, I’ll call Mycroft. Forward those to him?”

“Somehow I doubt he doesn’t already have them, but okay.”

Sherlock moved off into the kitchen, waiting only two rings for his brother to answer.

“Hearing from you twice in the same day, brother dearest?” Mycroft crooned. “Why, it must be Christmas.”

“Possibly, but instead of snow falling we’re experiencing the lovely sight of falling women,” Sherlock replied dryly.

“Quite,” Mycroft agreed. “The less said about the other one the better.”

“He’s in his end game, Mycroft,” Sherlock cut in.

“It would appear so. Have you reconsidered what we discussed this morning?”

“I… will mention it to John. Have your people noticed anything?”

“There was a potential sighting near Essex this morning. Harwich, to be exact. A team was sent out to search the area, they’re due to report in within the hour,” Mycroft said.

“I’ll speak with Lindner, see if we can’t get any more details-”

“And John.”

“And John,” Sherlock agreed.

“Stay indoors until you’ve done that.”

Sherlock responded to that by simply hanging up. He stared at the dark screen of his phone for a long breath, barely making out his own reflection in it. Mycroft’s plan was the best option they had at the moment, really the only one they had, but it didn’t make Sherlock like it. He’d already thought of and dismissed the idea well before today. They were running out of time now.

Sherlock unlocked his phone to fire off a quick text: _We will be making a trip to Tesco today. Walking. John will be armed._

He shoved the device into this pocket without waiting for a response. John was already tying up his shoes by the door, and looked up in confusion when Sherlock appeared beside him and began reaching for his own.

“Where are you going?” John asked.

“We were going to Tesco?” Sherlock fired back.

“No, _I_ was going to Tesco. Why are you coming?”

“Do you not want me to?”

“What? No. No, it’s fine. I don’t mind having you along. You just normally don’t go with me for these sorts of things,” John noted.

“I have before,” Sherlock protested.

“Once. In the states. Because you were the one driving and wanted a say on- Why are you coming?” John repeated.

Sherlock hesitated. “Can I not want to be with you?”

John raised an eyebrow at him.

“Fine. I’d rather not have us separated in public right now,” Sherlock admitted reluctantly.

John’s expression softened and he nodded, accepting that without further question. Sherlock hadn’t _lied_ , at least. He really didn’t want John out of his sight, not until he was on more solid footing with Ratica’s recent escalation. Plus, it was a nice day out. Project Sunshine had been a slow, somewhat frustrating endeavour so far. There’d been only minor improvements, and Sherlock didn’t quite know how to properly handle the situation. Still, he was trying.

Sherlock insisted they walk, and jumped directly into their people-watching game in order to distract John from it. Grocery shopping was just as awful as it had been in St. Louis. Sherlock entertained himself in the same fashion: finding the most obscure and interesting things he came across and returning them to John, as well as watching John’s interactions with people. He noticed right off that John’s normal flirtatious front was absent in his encounters, and that whenever he received such behaviour his eyes immediately scanned to find Sherlock. Not in a guilty way, but in a quick check of reassurance. Sherlock, ridiculously pleased with this, rewarded him by sneaking in a pack of John’s favourite biscuits right as they were checking out. John gave him a sickeningly fond smile at that.

Sherlock took some of the bags without complaint, immediately picking back up the game. John joined in this time, and their “deductions” became more and more ridiculous until they were both reduced to breathless giggles rather than actual words. Sherlock did, however, keep a constant watch of their surroundings despite the joking. He could tell John was as well, falling back on his training once more and conducting a constant, vigilant sweep of every alley and shop they passed.

Whether unfortunately or not, they made it home unmolested. The lack of bother from Mycroft confirmed this, and Sherlock made a mental note to try again as soon as the weather allowed it. He refused to put Project Sunshine completely on the back burners just because some half-baked criminal was salty about Sherlock being a smarter than him. So, two birds with one stone then.

He could continue working on Project Sunshine - which mostly consisted of reinforcing John’s comfort under cloudless skies by providing positive stimuli and activities under it - _and_ go through with Mycroft’s plans to use them as bait. Sherlock thought it was all working rather well so far, and was somewhat surprised to find himself enjoying it as much as he was. Apparently this whole dating/affectionate interaction thing actually did have some merit to it. The fact that it had taken him this long into his life to fully realize that was better left unanalyzed.

“Lindner’s calling,” John announced from the kitchen.

Sherlock abandoned his computer at the coffee table and hurried over. John was just setting the phone to speaker so he could continue putting away their groceries - which Sherlock _probably_ should have been helping with.

“Hello, David,” John called from across the kitchen.

“John,” Lindner greeted.

He sounded exhausted and more than a little stressed. Understandable, given the day’s events.

“You’re on speaker, Sherlock is here too.”

They exchanged a quick greeting, Lindner adept enough in Sherlockian mannerisms by now to know better than to dwindle.

“Deyr and Singleton were being kept in the same holding center, different blocks though. We were in the process of escorting Ms. Deyr to her court hearing, fourth floor of the courthouse, when the guard in charge of her pulled out this can of pepper spray and blasted all of us. I don’t even know how he got it through security. He kicked out a window and threw Deyr through before any of us could recover, followed her out afterwards,” Lindner detailed tiredly. “His name was Austin Bents, had been a guard for ten years. Absolutely spotless record, too clean really. Almost looks like someone went in and wiped it.”

“In the realm of possibility,” Sherlock allowed. “And Singleton?”

“I went over to check on him as soon as we finished up with Deyr. He was already dead. Don’t know how, but Bents was somehow assigned as Singleton’s primary guard too.”

John sighed loudly, crossing back to the kitchen table. “This is all definitely Ratica then. You still receiving death threats too?”

“Yeah, at least two a week. They’ve gotten meaner,” Lindner added.

“Ours too,” Sherlock replied, tapping his fingers restlessly on the table.

“We think he’s going to be making his move over here soon,” John provided.

Sherlock hesitated very briefly. “My brother suggested John and I be seen out in public more often for the next few days. Use ourselves as bait to draw him out.”

John’s head snapped around to stare at him, brow furrowing. Sherlock pretended not to notice.

“I might see if I can’t get transferred over there for a bit,” Lindner decided. “Can you send me some contact info for whoever you have covering this?”

“That’s Lestrade. I’ll email you in a mo,” John promised.

Sherlock left them to talk for a moment longer, heading back to his computer and sending off a quick text to both Lestrade and Mycroft. John followed him a few moments later and took up his “we need to talk and I’m going to stand here and glare at you until it happens” position. Better to get it over with then. Sherlock slowly dragged his gaze away from his computer and over to his irritated flatmate.

“When, exactly, were you planning on telling me we were being used as bait?” John demanded.

“When it became relevant,” Sherlock assured. “As it just did.”

“So, was that why you came with me earlier?”

“Only partially. I meant what I said at the time. I don’t want either of us going out alone right now. And if I’d told you then you would’ve been all tense and completely blow the whole thing,” Sherlock objected.

John paused mid retort, eyes narrowing. Whoops. Bit not good then.

“ _I_ would have blown it. How many stakeouts have _you_ blown because _you_ got tired of waiting? I’ve only messed up _one_ and that was because _somebody_ didn’t feel the need to let me in on the _whole_ plan!” John snapped.

Sherlock sighed heavily. “You’re right, that was a bad excuse.”

“Then how about you give me the truth instead?”

Sherlock faltered, half-shrinking under John’s glare. This was _not_ how that day was supposed to go. He wasn’t supposed to draw attention to Project Sunshine. That could ruin the whole thing. Sherlock would have to tell only part of the truth then. Wasn’t quite a lie, no matter how much John argued over “omission is a form of lying, Sherlock.”

“I… You already knew the threats had amplified, and that he was going to be making his move soon. You were tense enough already. Not to mention you were already armed and keeping an eye on everything without having to know about Mycroft’s ridiculous plan. I hadn’t actually intended to include you in it at all, if I _did_ decide to go through with it,” Sherlock said, grimacing when John’s expression darkened further.

“So, you were going to use _yourself_ as bait. Alone.”

“Potentially, yes.”

“You. Who are unarmed and have no self-preservation instincts to speak of.”

“ _Me._ Yes, John. Really. I did just fine when I-”

John held up a single finger, cutting him off. “You’re a bloody idiot, and from now on you are going to tell me everything your brother even _suggests_ we do. Are we clear? Good. Now shoo. I need to email Lindner and you have that experiment stinking up your lab.”

Sherlock blinked in surprise and hesitantly slunk off to his lab. He’d been dismissed then, and he had no idea if that was a good thing or not. Did that mean he was forgiven? Or did that mean John was just too frustrated to deal with him right now? Though usually when it was the latter John simply left the flat entirely. Was he staying because of Sherlock’s request that they stick together then?

A mug of tea thumped down beside him on the lab table, startling him. John was standing next to him, a half-smile on his face.

“Stop over analyzing everything,” He ordered fondly, then left.

Sherlock stared down at the mug, still blinking in bafflement. Well then.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Only two chapters left after this. 14 will be up on the 19th as normal, but chapter 15 may have to be up earlier than that following Sunday. I'll likely put it up on Friday before I leave for vacation (which is the 24th)
> 
> To my dearest Elizabeth, namesake of Eliza, you cannot get mad at me for throwing you out a window. You killed me first. In Hear Me, with a knife. In the rudest ship-destroying way possible. I'm not over that yet.


	15. Chapter 14

It took two weeks for Lindner to get permission to fly to London, during which time the threats had increased even more in hostility, but had fallen to only one per week. By Mycroft’s insistence, Sherlock and John went out almost daily. If it was a nice day, the walk was purely recreational. If not, Sherlock only allowed necessary outings to the shops or work. Because of this, Project Sunshine was at a near stall. Any time they _did_ go out, John was on constant alert, and Sherlock couldn’t bring himself to fight that level caution. Not with the actual threat of Ratica hanging over their heads.

John, while more vigilant than ever, proved to be a surprisingly adept actor during this time. He watched every street corner and shadow, yes, but with no noticeably raised level of attention than he normally did.

Unsurprising to no one, Lindner and Lestrade hit it off immediately. It was frightening really. The two could be brothers, with their matching greyed hair and gruff attitudes. Sherlock would bet John’s wallet that Lestrade would attempt to convince Lindner to a permanent transfer before the end of all this. He wasn’t actually sure Lindner would shoot it down either, or that Sherlock himself would be terribly opposed to it. Having another detective at the Yard that was willing to work with him was definitely a benefit.

“Got another one,” John called out from the kitchen. “This one’s different.”

Sherlock poked his head out of the lab. “Different? Different how?”

“It’s an envelope, not email.”

Sherlock hurried over now, glad to see John was wearing gloves and not handling the envelope directly. John had already carefully cut open the top and was peering into it with a slight frown.

“How do you know it’s from him?” Sherlock asked.

“Well, I can’t imagine anyone else who would send us a blank envelope containing a snakeskin,” John said dryly.

Sherlock blinked, then scooted closer to take a look himself. Sure enough, there was a short, pale skin inside.

“That certainly leaves little to the imagination,” Sherlock muttered. “And this was with the rest of our mail?”

John nodded. “Mixed in.”

“This was hand delivered then. I’ll have Mycroft check his cameras, see if it’s our normal man. We can rule one thing for certain though,” Sherlock mused.

“What’s that?”

“Ratica is in London, and he’s about to make his move.”

John stared down into the envelope again, frowning. “I need to call Lestrade and Lindner. And we should take this down to the lab, see if we can get anything out of it.”

“Mrs. Hudson is still at her sister’s, yes? Good. Best to have her safely out of the way,” Sherlock hummed, already firing off a text to his brother.

He received a response only minutes later - Mycroft must be in a “meeting” if he couldn’t be bothered to call - that the postman from this morning was definitely not their regular, and he was having his people look into it in depth. Sherlock carefully slipped the envelope and skin into an evidence bag he just so happened to have on hand, waiting for the follow up text he knew would arrive in only a moment. And, right on time, his phone pinged with a new message.

_It was Ratica._

“John, perhaps we really _should_ stop advertising our address on our websites,” Sherlock sighed.

“Bit late for that, don’t you think? Why, what did Mycroft find?” John asked, pulling his phone away from his ear for a moment.

“It was Ratica. He delivered it himself. Have Lestrade and Lindner meet us at the lab, I need to get started on this immediately,” Sherlock announced. “He’s going to make his move, and soon. We need to get ahead of him before he can.”

John relayed most of this through the phone, then quickly rang off and went for his shoes. They made it out the door and into a cab without issue, though John had completely dropped the pretense of _not_ being on alert and was instead watching everything and everyone with an intense sort of focus. Sherlock couldn’t help but find him terribly attractive in this sort of mood, and had to firmly remind himself that now was really not the time to be entertaining such thoughts. That did _not_ , however, stop his mind from drawing up possible scenarios he could induce that would get that focus redirected onto _him_ instead while they waited in traffic. Sherlock made sure to keep his expression carefully collected during that drive, hoping that anything John may have noticed could be excused away as him planning out their next move.

Sherlock found himself silently cursing the warmer weather of the day, having made sure John exited the cab before him and bemoaning the safety his coat could have provided.

Molly met them in the lab at Barts, waiting at the door and eager for orders. As usual, Sherlock did his best to ignore the painfully obvious attempts for his attention, which were actually becoming more bothersome than amusing at this point and were doing the exact opposite of putting John at ease. In the past, Molly’s sad attempts at flirting were met by either sympathy or mild amusement from John. Now, he seemed to be doing everything in his power to keep from glaring at her. Sherlock was debating whether or not he should let it boil over, simply for the pleasure of seeing John get possessive, or if he should spare poor Molly by intervening himself at the first available opportunity.

Whether unfortunately or not, said opportunity arrived nearly a full hour later, when a very annoyed John finally stormed out of the lab, saying something quick and dismissive about getting coffee. He was out the door before Sherlock could think to protest their separation. During the brief ten or so minutes of John’s absence, Sherlock decided for the better to intervene already. He waited impatiently for John’s return, glancing at the door periodically and pointedly ignoring Molly’s hovering, and immediately perked up when John swept back into the room, paper cups in each hand and expression still a bit too stormy for Sherlock’s liking.

He placed a paper cup at Sherlock’s elbow - Sherlock didn’t miss the fact that he hadn’t gotten Molly one - and turned to return to his chair. Sherlock shot out a hand to catch his arm before he could move off too much, drawing him back in to place a quick kiss on his jaw. John blinked at him in surprise for a half a beat before breaking into a small smile.

“Ta, love,” Sherlock hummed.

John ruffled a hand through his hair, still smiling softly to himself and his mood immensely brightened. Sherlock cast a swift glance at the now silent Molly. She was smiling a bit as well, but it was a sad, and she was studiously going about her work. Sherlock could only hope it would put an end to her antics and that she would move on – further than she had with that Tom fellow preferably. She deserved better.

The door opened again several quiet minutes later, and in entered Lestrade and Lindner. Sherlock should have guessed they’d arrive together. He absently wondered how Mycroft was handling his partner’s time being suddenly monopolized by an American. This, of course, turned to Sherlock full-heartedly scheming potential ways to ensure Lindner’s permanent transfer.

“What’ve we got?” Lestrade asked at once, foregoing any further greeting past a slight nod to each of them.

“Cheap envelope, picked up at a petrol station going by the smell. Skin is from an adolescent rattlesnake, timber. Native to Missouri. I doubt he brought the actual snake with him, this skin is fairly old and not very well preserved. I’m running tests on the dirt that fell off,” Sherlock added, barely glancing up from the computer screen in front of him, his mind half on the work and half still gleefully planning more ways to piss off his brother.

“Lara only had records for one timber rattlesnake, and it was accounted for,” Lindner provided.

“Then he obtained the skin before disposing of Lara. It certainly looks old enough,” Sherlock agreed.

“The prints finished running,” Molly piped up from across the room. “It’s a match for Timothy Ratica.”

“He isn’t trying to hide at all now, is he?” John mused, brow furrowing. “He’s been going through all this trouble to lay low since March, why stop now?”

Sherlock hummed thoughtfully, idly considering the monitor in front of him. “What’s more dangerous, a man who has everything, or a man with nothing left to lose?”

The three men stared at him, Molly still engrossed in her own work and simply making a small noise of assent. Sherlock stood and carefully moved away from the computer to stand beside John. He made sure to stay just a bit away to avoid accidentally hitting when he began talking, knowing he had a tendency to use his hands a tad flamboyantly when explaining things.

“He doesn’t care anymore. He wants revenge, and he doesn’t care what happens to him as long as he gets it,” Sherlock said. “We ruined him. He didn’t know it at the time, when he fled, but we’d ruined him. His entire operation in the Missouri was exposed and shut down, his liaisons were rounded up and _every_ one of them gave information to the police. We know his methods, he can’t set up shop anywhere else without us noticing the similarities. He would have to set up a whole new system. This late in his life and this far into trouble, that’s not an option anymore. He knows that now. I don’t think he did before.”

“That would explain the sudden spike in hate,” John theorized. “He stopped to think about starting over, realized he’s been backed into a corner.

“Precisely. Ratica is livid now, and he doesn’t have anything left to lose at this point,” Sherlock warned.

“So, we need to snag him before he can retaliate,” Lindner said firmly. “Any leads?”

Sherlock spun back around to his computer, which had just pinged to announce its completion, and began scanning the contents.

“Some of this is clearly Missouri soil, leftover from the skin, but there’s more… I’ll need to process this further to pinpoint its exact location, but this is from here… A factory of some sort, there’s machinery oil,” Sherlock reported, mind racing ahead.

“He dropped it wherever he’s staying then?” Lestrade guessed.

“Most likely. Something on beside water too, by the looks of it. Narrows it down a bit.”

“I’ll see if My has anything more from the video footage from earlier. Maybe he can at least point us in the right direction,” Lestrade offered, pulling out his phone. “Or at the very least, he probably already has a list of all waterfront disused factories.”

Sherlock crinkled his nose in distaste at the nickname, and John smirked at him. Lindner was flipping through a file he’d been carrying, jotting down brief notes here and there and either oblivious to or purposely ignoring Molly’s hovering. Didn’t seem like she was too broken up over it then. Was Lindner married? He wasn’t wearing a ring, but hadn’t there been a photo on his desk of a young man? He’d been in military garb. Son? Sherlock couldn’t remember. He’d have to ask John later.

“Sherlock, you should talk to your network,” Lestrade broke in. “Maybe they’ve heard something.”

“Talking to those people is so expensive,” John muttered, hand unconsciously moving to hover protectively over his wallet.

Sherlock ignored him. “Already have some of them on alert. I’ll have them ask around a bit. Should get something from them by the end of the day.”

Lestrade didn’t necessarily approve of his homeless network, but he was willing to turn a blind eye to it when necessary, and would openly admit to their usefulness on some rare occasions. John’s only complaint was the amount of money that went into getting even miniscule amounts of information from these people… and that Sherlock occasionally let some of them into the flat.

“Lindner, tell me more about Deyr’s murder,” Sherlock requested after a moment. “The events leading up to and following, if you will.”

Lindner nodded amicably. “The guard escorting her was a big guy, real muscle, but he wasn’t all that rough. Kind of a daisy, actually. I’ve worked with him before, never had any issue. He’d been looking a bit under the weather that morning and shrugged off any questions about his health. I looked up his medical records afterwards just to check. Pancreas cancer, well advanced.”

“He was probably on his way out then,” John spoke up. “Did you look into what sort of life insurance he was leaving behind?”

“Yeah, and it wasn’t much. Had three kids at home and a wife. She’s a nurse at a small health clinic, not terribly much income there.”

“Well, there’s your motive. Like the cab driver back in our first case, Sherlock,” John remarked. “Terminal, not leaving much for his family, some guy gives him an offer he can’t refuse.”

Sherlock nodded in assent, then motioned for Lindner to continue.

“I still don’t know how he got the pepper spray into the building. You have to go through a full items check and scanners just to get in, and I didn’t see any on him then. It was confusing, still is really. Anyway, we were walking through a hall leading up to the courtroom and Deyr had just said some snarky comment about the hallway’s wallpaper being as drab as her personality or something when Bents snapped. At first I thought he’d killed her because of that, that he’d had a meltdown or something. She’d been making little comments like that since we brought her in. Wasn’t until I found Singleton that I pieced two and two together. My boys back home are still working out how Bents was in contact with Ratica. They’ll let me know as soon as they have anything, but I’d put my money on a burner phone like what the rest of his contacts used,” Lindner finished.

“Whatever he was using to contact Bent, I doubt it will lead us anywhere. He’s been careful about that so far,” Sherlock said, glaring hatefully at the spinny wheel on his computer screen.

“Might at least give us a time frame for how long this has been in the works. That’d give us an estimate for how long it takes him to get things organized,” Lestrade put it. “Lindner, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to go over your file again, see if there’s anything we might’ve missed. Sherlock, text as soon as you get something, yeah?”

John gave the affirmative on that, Sherlock already too immersed in sifting through data to be bothered with a reply. He glanced up just long enough to see the detectives leave, Molly trotting along after them. John came over to drop onto the stool beside him once they’d gone and glanced over the computer screen with interest.

“Is this enough to find him?” He asked hopefully.

“No,” Sherlock admitted. “There was very little sediment to test from, and what little there was is contaminated by the machine oil. I did manage to find traces of phosphoric acid and high fructose corn syrup.”

John paused. “So, a soda factory then?”

“Possibly. Also probable that Ratica simply spilled his drink, though. I need more to work with, and Molly hasn’t finished processing the skin yet,” Sherlock growled. “Now that she’s gone prancing of with them, that won’t be done any time soon.”

John’s hand came up to thread through Sherlock’s curls, tugging lightly at the end of its pass. Sherlock immediately leaned into the touch and sighed, some of his tension evaporating. John repeated the motion as he spoke.

“Computers can only run so fast, Sherlock. She’ll finish it, and then you’ll find him. How about we head out for a bite? Nothing else to be done here until the skin is done.”

“We can’t just leave Barts and-”

“That coffee shop you like is just across the street.”

“...Fine. But we’re bringing it back here.”

* * *

“Sherlock, you can’t just-”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

“Well, yes. But it was _rude-”_

“She wouldn’t have even noticed what I said if you hadn’t started laughing!”

“Sherlock, she was a fan! She was just saying hi-”

“We don’t have time for that, we’re _supposed_ to be working. What would _you_ have done?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Anything other than go ‘sorry, I’m not wearing my glasses right now, I can’t hear you’ and _walk away!”_

They stopped outside the lab, Sherlock spinning around to raise his eyebrows at John, who was biting his lip to keep from bursting into laughter again. His eyes were twinkling with mirth despite his protests. Sherlock schooled his expression into the picture of innocence, which had the intended effect of finally breaking him. John fell against the doorframe and started giggling.

“I can’ believe you did that,” John guffawed.

“Oh please, that’s hardly the most ridiculous thing we’ve ever done,” Sherlock chuckled.

“ _Still.”_

Sherlock opened the door to the lab, ushering John in front of him. The lab was still empty, so Sherlock took no issue in crowding John backwards into the lab station and taking his lips in a searing kiss. John’s hands fluttered in shock for a moment before carefully setting down their food behind him, then reaching up to grasp Sherlock’s shoulders and draw him in closer. Sherlock was very sorely tempted to escalate things, he’d always had a secret fantasy involving a certain flatmate and the lab they’d first met in. He couldn’t let himself get too entranced though, not with work still needing to be done, and reluctantly broke away a few minutes later. John remained still for a moment longer, panting lightly and looking deliciously disheveled.

“Well. That’s one fantasy fulfilled,” John hummed happily.

_Nearly_ fulfilled, Sherlock mentally corrected.

Sherlock raised an eyebrow at this. “Oh? You’ll have to tell me what others you’d like fulfilled.”

John broke into breathless chuckles, winding his arms behind Sherlock’s head to draw him down into one more brief kiss. Sherlock had to break away from this one too, even more reluctantly than the last, and put some space between them.

“Science, John,” Sherlock reprimanded. “And no matter what you say, that was definitely an effective way to get rid of an annoying fan and I am definitely going to be using it again in the future.”

John shook his head, laughing. “Dear lord, I’m in love with a mad man.”

Sherlock surged forward to kiss him again, startling both of them. If this kept up, he really wasn’t going to get any work done at all.

“Just now figuring that out?” Sherlock teased as he retreated to the other side of the lab table.

John smiled warmly in response, already settling onto his stool and pulling the bag of food closer to him. Sherlock turned his attention to his computer and reached out to wake the screen. He froze mid-reach. John noticed the change of atmosphere immediately, his head shooting up and taking a quick stock of the room. He frowned, turning back to stare at Sherlock in concern. Sherlock slowly finished his reach and pulled a light blue post-it note from the computer screen.

“What is it?” John asked cautiously.

“An address, and a message. ‘Come play,’” Sherlock read off, then frowned at the address. “This is in Canary Wharf.”

“Well, guess he really has given up on hiding,” John surmised.

“Guess so. There’s a meeting time for tomorrow at noon.”

“Are we really going to wait that long?”

“Do you have your gun?”

“Of course. Are we telling Lestrade before or after?”

“I’ll text him on the way.”

John nodded, already going through the process of checking his Sig. Sherlock opened the door for him and followed him out, excitement pouring into him. _Finally._

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Only one more chapter after this. I am being a tad indecisive about when it will be uploaded. Either this upcoming Friday or normal Sunday time. Probably the latter. 
> 
> Thank you everyone who's been along for the ride. You are all wonderful, and your comments and kudos are greatly appreciated. I apologize for not really responding to comments. I do read them all, but if I responded it would probably end up a book-length thank you interspersed with screaming.


	16. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, guess what the very first chapter of Sunshine ever written was?

John insisted they head back to the flat first for supplies, claiming they would at the very least need handcuffs if they were going to go up against Ratica officially. When Sherlock complained about this detour being a waste of valuable daylight, John responded by simply adding a torch to their “need to grab” list. Since their last torch had regrettably taken a rather unfortunate tumble into a storm drain only a few weeks ago, that now warranted a quick stop at a store so John could run in and grab them new ones, leaving Sherlock to twitch impatiently in the cab with their very unimpressed and bored looking driver. Sherlock was starting to miss the convenience of having a car at their disposal, and was startled out of the beginnings of honest financial considerations by John’s return.

“Is that everything?” Sherlock demanded as John slid back into the cab.

“No, but it’ll do. Don’t forget to text Lestrade,” John reminded, then as an afterthought, “and your brother.”

Sherlock made a small noise of assent, and didn’t so much forget as make a conscious decision _not_ to text either of them at that moment, with the half-formed intent to do so once they were closer to the appointed address. He _did_ , however, send off a quick text to Angelo for him to drop off their usual orders at the flat later in the evening. He didn’t imagine the arrest would take too terribly long, and John would be hungry again soon. Besides, finally closing this case called for a bit of celebration, didn’t it?

As Sherlock tucked his phone away, John’s hand reach over to tangle through his and give it a gentle squeeze. John was staring out the side window at the first golden hints of the sunset, a soft, contented smile on his lips. Sherlock returned the grip and continued watching him for a moment longer. Project Sunshine wasn’t quite completed yet, he could tell by the ever so slight crease at the corners of John’s eye, just barely giving away the tension he still felt. Not over, but getting there.

Once this case was out of the way and they could breathe easier, Sherlock decided they were due an official holiday, with touristy activities and everything. No cases, no experiments.

“Drop us off a few blocks away,” Sherlock spoke up a moment later, once they were getting closer.

John looked over at him in question.

“Best not to give ourselves away _too_ quickly, John. Element of surprise, remember?”

He nodded slightly, gathering up their supplies and doing another check over his Sig. The cabby dropped them off two blocks away from the addressed building, at which point the sun was well on its way to setting, and hurried off the second they’d paid. Sherlock glanced up and down the street, taking note that this was definitely _not_ the kind of area people should be walking through at night. Not that it really mattered to him, of course. John was armed, and they’d been in plenty of worse neighbourhoods before. John didn’t seem too terribly concerned about it either, though Sherlock knew it would be hell to find a cab to take them home from here. He’d likely have to suck it up and accept one of Mycroft’s numerous awful cars afterwards.

The building - if it could even be _called_ that - was an abandoned soda factory, as predicted. The address was barely visible in the shadows, confirming their location, and Sherlock started towards it right off. John’s hand flashed out, catching the cuff of Sherlock’s sleeve. The grip wasn't necessarily restraining, but it was firm enough to make Sherlock pause. He looked down at the shorter man, taking quick note of the hesitant edge to his stance and the way his eyes were flicking rapidly over something before them, and waited. John had noticed something off, some reason to call for care, and Sherlock had learned it was better in the long run for everyone to trust John’s instincts on matters such as these.

“It’s that building?” John asked, eyeing the brick hovel in question. “And you’re absolutely certain?”

“Yes, of course,” Sherlock snapped somewhat impatiently. “Second floor most likely, but I wouldn't rule out the third. Better access to the fire escape from there… or what’s left of it anyway.”

“Sherlock, this place looks completely done in.”

“What do you suggest? That we stand outside and ask nicely that him to come down? Do remember that he _is_ a wanted serial killer and fairly successful drug lord whose identity has just been discovered. He’s desperate.”

John frowned, glancing between the detective and the old factory. After a long moment of indecision, John finally gave a nod and huffed out a reluctant breath.

“Fine. Lead on,” John urged.

Sherlock paused a moment longer, simply observing John. He was as ready to wrap up this whole fiasco as Sherlock, but where Sherlock would have gone straight into the place without too much forethought, John found time to observe. Looking at it now, Sherlock could clearly see the structural failings of the place. It really did look like a slight breeze would be enough to send the whole thing crumbling in on itself.

“Take care of where you step,” Sherlock warned, purely for John’s benefit, and set off towards the half-open door.

He skimmed passed it, careful not to disturb where it hung precariously on one overly rusted hinge. It was dim inside, the only light coming through the few filthy, non-boarded windows. The floor was covered in all sorts of debris, making it impossible to move completely silently.

Charting out the clearest path to the admittedly questionable metal spiral staircase in the far corner, Sherlock motioned for John to hand over the torch. He didn't dare light it just yet though; no, best to maintain the element of surprise for as long as possible.

The first tentative step on the staircase yielded no blaring concerns, so Sherlock began his ascent. John treaded softly not far behind him, gun at the ready even though they still had a ways to go. Sherlock didn't complain. If it wasn't for his need to watch their path for weaknesses, he would have allowed John to take point instead. As it was, it was slow going up the stairs with Sherlock pointing out those that looked too rusted through or ones that might creak. The unusually muggy heat trapped within the building wasn't helping any either. By the time they’d reached the third floor, both men were beaded with light sweat.

“This is the only functional stairway,” Sherlock hissed. “If he makes a go to escape, we’ll hear it.”

They stood for a long moment, listening. From somewhere down the hall to their right, the scuffling of something too large for even the hefty rats that infested the place was audible. With slow, calculated steps, they set off towards it. The two paused outside the cracked door, tense and ready. Two voices, both young and one unmistakably female, drifted out. John looked across at Sherlock, and the man shook his head, mouthing “kids.”

They backed away from the door, about to head back the way they’d came when the room on the other side of the hall burst into life. That was clearly the movement of one heavy-set, agitated individual on the other side. Barely taking a glance at Sherlock for confirmation, John snapped a boot-clad foot out and sent the weak door slamming back into the wall. The man inside froze, eyes wide as saucers, and bolted for a far door. John was after him in a heartbeat, already having recognized him as Ratica.

This time it was Sherlock who paused long enough to observe their environment. It was subtle, almost enough so to have been overlooked, lost in the noise. But Sherlock was pretty sure that floorboard was dipping under Ratica’s foot, and that the groan he heard was actually coming from the wood itself.

“John-”

Sherlock’s cry of warning was lost under the splintering _crack_ of the floor giving way. The addition of John’s weight was too much for the neglected wood. It started with that board, buckling between the combined weight of John and Ratica’s bodies, and pulled down the surrounding boards with it, tearing them all free to create a monstrous hole in the floor. Sherlock lunged forward, fingertips just barely making contact with John’s jacket before he realized his mistake. The ground under his feet pitched forward violently, sliding towards the rapidly widening hole. John and Ratica vanished through it first with twin shouts of surprise. Sherlock barely had time to register that he was falling before he was suddenly slamming into an uneven surface, the ceiling seeming to rain down on top of him.

They’d fallen through only two floors, the one they’d landed on groaning in complaint at the sudden weight. For a long moment, as the dust settled and the explosion of noise faded into horrible, blood chilling silence, Sherlock’s brain was simply blank. It took a few agonizing moments for it to come back online, and even longer for him to completely rebound to regain air from the impact. His breath was torn away as quickly as it had returned when the pain caught up to him. Something was definitely broken, most likely several somethings actually, and his left arm appeared to be entirely unresponsive. Another check confirmed that his legs were pinned by a beam or rafter. It hurt too much to attempt turning his head to look around.

“John?” Sherlock called out, voice coming out crackling and weak.

He choked briefly on the dust that had yet to settle out of the air, and then tried again, louder.

“John?”

“Here, Sherl,” John’s faint, strained voice replied, sounding muffled somewhere off to his left.

“You alright?”

“Don’ think so… You?”

“Pinned and a bit fuzzy. I think I can reach my phone. Stay with me,” Sherlock ordered.

He managed to free his right arm from under some ceiling tile that smelled suspiciously of ammonia and extracted his phone from his pocket. The screen was severely cracked from having landed on it, but it appeared to be mostly functional. With care, he dialed Lestrade and raised the device to his head. Should it still be this difficult to breathe? Surely he wasn't still winded.

Lestrade answered on the third ring, opening with a furious shout of “Where the _hell_ have you flounced off to now?!”

Sherlock cut him off before he could continue further, rambling off the address on a thin breath. “The floor’s given out, I’m pinned and John is… John?! John, are you still with me?”

“Yeah… Yeah, ‘m here.”

His voice was more distant now.

“Quickly, Lestrade,” Sherlock snapped, then coughed.

A vicious stabbing exploded in his chest and his mouth filled with copper as his vision whited out momentarily. He completely missed whatever Lestrade had said next.

“Oh,” Sherlock breathed in dizzy surprise.

“What? Sherlock, what is it?” Lestrade demanded.

Sherlock didn't reply right away, still reeling in shock.

“Sherl?” John called, concerned and distinctly more pained.

His vision was going grey around the edges, everything suddenly becoming heavy and muffled. There was a _thwumping_ sound in his ears that was getting gradually louder, and he couldn’t seem to air in his lungs.

* * *

He was underwater, he had to be. Why else would everything be so muffled? He couldn't seem to draw breath properly either. How had this happened? He didn't remember there being a river next to the factory. No, not underwater. Too dry, everything was much too dry here. His throat burned and his tongue felt disconcertingly numb. It was an effort to pry open his eyes, even more so to ignore the entirely too bright lights above him. There was an insistent beeping to his left somewhere.

A hospital. No other explanation. Why was he here? With gradually increasing clarity, it began to come back to him. The factory, little more than a tall shambled hut, with rats galore and Ratica hiding in a barren room above. There had been the shattering of wood, dread and fear, and then... And then what?

"Ah, you're awake then," a nasal, but soft voice stated beside him. "You had quite the fall, brother dear."

Fall. Reichenbach. Web of crime. But, that’d happened years ago, hadn’t it? Where was he?

"My-" his voice died in a painful wheeze.

"Now, now. No talking just yet. You've had a lung punctured, wouldn't do to stress it further. I will call a nurse for ice chips," the man soothed.

His brother finally came into focus as he leaned across Sherlock for the call button. Despite the calm exterior he was attempting to protrude, there were the tell-tale hints of stress around his cold eyes. Sherlock made a mental note to look into that further after the second heartbeat throbbing in his head had subsided.

A nurse bustled into the room, shooing Mycroft aside, and began nudging Sherlock into a slightly more upright position as she set a cup of ice chips on his tray and adjusted his medication. With a terse promise of calling his doctor, she left without any further ado. Sherlock decided he rather liked her. To the point, no dilly dallying or false platitudes, just work. He would likely be in here for some time, and having a tolerable nurse would make things much simpler. The thought jarred him back to the present and he turned his head, a little too swiftly for comfort, to his brother.

"John?" Sherlock demanded, voice somewhat stronger thanks to the ice.

“Down the hall, still under sedation. It is… not good. Nothing for certain yet, but the doctors aren’t too optimistic at this point. However, I have found that your good doctor is just as stubborn as yourself, if not more so,” Mycroft admitted.

Sherlock fell silent, reaching with his fight hand to the cup of ice. His left arm was in a hard cast, though his hand was free but held his IV. His ring and little finger on his right hand were splinted as well. All in all, he felt like he'd been hit by a train... and then double-tapped by said train.

"Tell me," Sherlock said softly, knowing his meaning would be understood.

Lestrade had arrived at the factory with his team and an ambulance ten minutes after Sherlock had passed out, during which time John had remained awake. He was still responsive when help arrived, though lost consciousness while being transferred to the vehicle. John had suffered from a moderate concussion, multiple broken ribs and collarbone, along with severe internal bleeding. His heart had been restarted twice on the ride to the hospital. They had both been rushed into surgery upon arrival, John had not regained consciousness since. Sherlock had dislocated his left arm at the shoulder, as well as broken his radius two inches above his wrist, had severe whiplash in his neck, and a mild concussion. His worst injury came from a broken rib that had helpfully punctured a lung as he was on the phone with Lestrade. The rest of his pain came from the numerous bruises all over his person. Ratica had been declared dead at the scene, his spine and neck broken in various places.

Sherlock absorbed all of this as well as his drug-addled brain could, and made a request to see Lestrade and Lindner as soon as they were available, with direction that they wake him when they arrived, or if anything new came up with John. Mycroft accepted this request without argument, and Sherlock allowed himself to slide back under the bliss of drug-hazed sleep.

 

It was a long while later when Lestrade finally arrived at this door. The older man looked stricken and pale as he came to stand at the bedside. Surely Sherlock didn't look _that_ bad. But wait... no, there was an edge to the Lestrade’s expression.

"John?" Sherlock asked, a bolt of adrenaline dumping into his veins.

Lestrade sank into the chair beside him. "He's coded again. They're fighting to get him back."

Sherlock was up and out of the bed before Lestrade could even make it fully through the doorway. Of course, he was heavily drugged and mostly battered, so it stands without saying that he didn’t make it very far. Lestrade was there, heaving him back onto the bed and slamming a hand down on the nurse call button. Sherlock clawed at the bandages around his chest, sucking in desperate little gasps and choking on copper. He hardly cared about the pain exploding throughout his body, and continued to fight against Lestrade’s restraining hands.

“Sherlock. _Sherlock!_ Stop! You’re hurting yourself, just stop,” Lestrade was shouting. “There’s nothing you can do, they’re doing the best they can but you can’t go to him. Lay back before you make it worse!”

Several nurses had made it in by then and rushed over to aid Lestrade in pinning him down. Someone quickly redid his IV and turned up the drip. Sherlock’s movements became sluggish, body numbing and struggles receding.

“Sherlock, it’s going to be okay,” Lestrade was saying, trying to calm him. “Just calm down. They’re working on it, and now they’re going to have to be working on you too. But you need to calm down-”

His voice was fading. Everything was fading.

_John._

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you guessed this one, you're correct. This was the very first part of Sunshine I ever wrote, back before it was even Sunshine or had a plot/antagonist. It sat for a long while just as is before I then threw together the Prelude and Finale, nudged both of those at a small test group of readers, and then finally filled in the body of the story.  
> So, yeah. I regret none of the things. I am in fact the worst human being.  
> Finale will be up on the 10th of July.


	17. Finale

Sherlock paused in the doorway, taking a moment simply to enjoy the half-warm breeze of early spring that caressed through his hair like in a fresh, friendly greeting. Behind him, the cabin was silent save for the soft hum of the water heater refilling. Sherlock had decided to devote part of his semi-newly established retirement into fixing the place back up, but it was a much more involved hobby than he had initially conceived. It belonged to the Holmes family, had for generations, but fallen into a rather pitiful state of neglect over the past few decades. The appliances were terribly outdated, and most of the wiring had been chewed through by rodents over the years. It was a slow, time consuming task of getting the place back up to shape, and Sherlock loved every minute of it much more than he would probably be willing to admit.

The cabin had been his favourite place as a child, and he couldn’t think of anywhere better to spend the remainder of his life in his retirement. Not that he was being particularly faithful to it currently. He still took cases now and then, but only light ones. It’d been a torture to admit that his body was wearing out, that he could no longer dart through the streets of London with the youthful abandon that he once took for granted. Years of abuse and neglect was finally catching up with a spiteful sort of vengeance.

So, he’d formally retired, packed up, and moved down to the family cabin in Sussex. John had always assumed that Sherlock never really stopped to enjoy the simple things in life - and until the ex-army doctor had entered it, Sherlock could admit that to be the case. During the time Sherlock had been working to revive John’s love for the sun, John had been subtly instilling a fondness for the simple things in Sherlock in return.

Now, in moments such as this, with the clean breeze sweeping in over the hillside, Sherlock would stop to enjoy it. It was the little things, the way the stars shone on a clear night on the countryside, the sounds around him that reminded him that even in his own quiet existence, life was continuing. It was the reflection of the setting sun off the pond, with its warm rays casting everything in a gold hue, glinting off the tendrils of steam that rose from the water’s surface, and the faint scent of the maple trees on the steady breeze.

It was the simplicity of it all that now soothed Sherlock's normally hazardous mind as he settled into the porch swing, tucking his legs up beneath him, and sat staring out at the field with his tea in hand. It was still difficult, at times, to get his mind to slow down to something manageable. Being this relaxed was a rarity for him nowadays, a kind of gift John had bestowed upon him with this new appreciation for life.

It had been just about ten years since that dreadful night in the factory, and while Sherlock was having commitment issues to it, he knew he was soon to be on retirement's doorstep permanently. He still experienced some problems with his left shoulder, having never quite healed properly, and other injuries that came with the job had added to old age's fight against him.

Two or so years ago, Sherlock had received a request from Jaydon to meet in person. Curious and lonely, Sherlock had accepted. Jaydon was practically unrecognizable from the skinny, soft spoken and hard-driven teen of the case before. Sherlock, for once genuinely interested in the life of another, had asked how he was getting on, and Jaydon told him about how he had completed all of his courses and taken a place in the local forensics division, he hinted that he knew of Sherlock’s influential recommendation but didn’t outright thank him for it. His mother had been promoted and had remarried, she still lived in America where he heard she was very happy. Jaydon now shared a flat in London with his boyfriend, who was another forensic analyst on the team. Neither of them mentioned Sherlock’s influence in landing him that job.

Before he was to return to work, Jaydon fell silent for several minutes.

"Mr. Holmes... I know, with your line of work you probably hear all of this often, but... I am extremely grateful for what you two did for me and my mom," Jaydon said.

"You needn't thank me, it-"

"No, I do. I know you were the one that made me going to school possible. So... thank you, Mr. Holmes," He pressed, then paused. "I wish I could have thanked Doctor Watson in person too..."

Sherlock inclined his head. "I am sure he would be proud to see the man you've become. Should you need anything, you know how to reach me."

They ‘d said their goodbyes and parted ways, Sherlock feeling much older than he probably should, having seen the scrawny teenage boy from his memory suddenly take the form of a man.

Now, as he stared out at the magnificent hues of the setting sun, Sherlock felt a distinct satisfaction at the closing of that case, and a sad sort of contentment towards all the memories that case came with. It was enough for the simple sight of the golden sun was enough to bring a warmth to Sherlock’s heart. This sunset he found to be particularly lovely. There were a few sparse clouds still dotting the sky, their undersides glowing a brilliant, fiery orange, and the tops a storm-darkened grey. John always loved these ones the most, the blend of sun and cloud.

 

The swing jolted suddenly, startling Sherlock from his thoughts. He looked up, meeting the eyes of his husband and smiling. Switching his tea to his other hand, Sherlock reached across the seat to take his hand. Sherlock's thumb brushed over the doctor's ring, tracing the engraving set in the platinum. Two simple words, holding all the meaning Sherlock could never properly say: _My Sunshine._

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edit: In order not to be too terrible of a human being, I have added a short apology piece as part of this series.


End file.
